Saturday, December 31, 2011

A very Happy New Year's Eve to everyone and scraping in under the wire that is the year end, I have been very lax in bringing news of this year's annual village play. I'll be in trouble if I don't mention the Milton Abbot Players sell-out production of It Runs in the Family by Ray Cooney because I think the Players may have been waiting very patiently since November to see the pictures on here.

Bookhound was enlisted by Jim the Postie (peeking through at the back...yes that's Jim who delivers all the books) to help with the props and scenery this year and here's the backstage crew with props various...This seemed to be the cue for bits of furniture to go missing from home in order to populate the Doctor's Common Room of St Andrew's Hospital, London. And it was a funny thing when the curtains opened on the stage in the village hall, (with the customary hand appearing around to pull them back when they got stuck, which they do every year) funny in that it was all a bit familiar, a sort of deja vue stage set.

The synopsis of It Runs in the Family is glorious...

Dr David Mortimore is preparing to address a conference of neuro-surgeons with a speech certain to guarantee him a knighthood. In rushes a visitor. A nurse he had a fling with 18 years ago. Mortimore learns that as a result of their tryst she bore him a son. A son who is at this moment rampaging round the hospital searching for his wayward father! Attempting to cover up such a catastrophe on this important day sets the fibs fizzing. “If you’re going to tell a lie, tell a whopper,” yells Dr Mortimore as events begin to spin deliriously out of control. He enlists the help of hospital staff. In the ensuing chaos his best friend is passed off as the boy’s father! Fierce matron falls off the window ledge with a hypodermic needle in her rump! And several doctors end up in nurses’ uniform! There are more twists and turns in this outrageously funny farce than the Monaco Grand Prix. An evening of delicious and uproarious fun for all.

The programme that accompanies the play is always hilarious with potted biographies of the actors...

'Having studied at RADA (Royal Academy of Doing Acting) Tim left the bright lights of London in search of a more rewarding acting career in Milton Abbot Village Hall.Some comments in praise of Tim:"nobody does it quite like Tim ...thank heavens" - Kenneth Brannagh"His Annie Get Your Gun was not so much a 'tour de force' but 'forced to tour'..." - Maggie Smith

I recognize that desk...I'm sure I've seen that drinks trolley somewhere before.. Dr Mortimore's son discovers his father and falls on his knees...just as the Consultant walks in. Yes it was as dodgy as it looked and by this point we are crying with laughter......now beside ourselves as Matron, out on the windowsill takes a direct hit in the left upper outer quadrantWith perfect timing Doctor Bonney pulls the curtains on a lanced Matron as the Consultant walks in to ask yet again why Doctor Mortimore is not giving his lecture......Dr Mortimore is busy digging himself out of a hole and the front row is about to get a soda-syphon soaking... as is the Police Sergeant sent to investigate the disturbance ...as is our desk......Drs Mortimore and Bonney reappear as duplicate Matrons, now we are almost in need of oxygen......and now in need of resuscitation.....hats off to Matron for holding this pose in the wheelchair..Cue thunderous applause and cheering.And though we curl up laughing every year I don't think we have ever laughed quite this much. I'm not sure the pictures do it justice and if they are blurred my apologies, I really was in hysterics. but congratulations to the Players for a brilliant production.

The Players have been in existence and producing a play each November since 1928 on a stage supplied to the Village Hall by the Duke of Bedford. November chosen because the cast would often be made up of members of the local farming community who had time to rehearse during September and October after the harvest.

AmDram alive and well in the Tamar Valley for another year. Does this sort of thing happen where you are??

Friday, December 30, 2011

I was having a clear out of half-written blog posts still in draft, ones that will never make the cut when I found this one from November, and with a pile of books that seem too good to pass over so I'm squeezing them in before the year's end.

Perhaps I had subliminally absorbed all the beautiful autumnal colours outside and my mind had taken over, but I happened to glance at the pile of books on the table and noticed that they were all of a match...and then I realised that they all actually also matched my very lovely Orla Kiely notebook which stays around for a quick bookish jot now and again.

So if you have a room in your home that can take autumn colours here's the very stack of books for you and today's selection includes gifts, possibles, permanents and keep meaning tos.

The Country Diaries edited by Alan Taylor and Roger Deakin's Notes From Walnut Tree Farm are a permanent bedside fixture. I am now on my second year of reading and following the seasons with Roger and I doubt I will ever tire of doing so...

'It's mid-November and crickets are still singing outside the kitchen door...and bumblebees are still visiting the nasturtium flowers.- 11th November'

And whilst I love Roger's contemporaneous thoughts I also enjoy reading what people were doing each day in 1876 or 1928. The Country Diaries are a microcosm of life through the ages.

'Rain last night and the morning not very promising, tis surely dreadful weather. Briffet is here to kill the sow. A horrible looking fellow, his very countenance is sufficient to kill anything, a large hulky fellow, a face absolutely furrowed with small pox (a very uncommon thing in these days of innoculations)... 11th November 1799.

My thanks to Carol for A Year in the Woods by Colin Elford, a gem of a book that has now been enrolled in this happy band of daily reading and which I will start on Januray Ist 2012. It is the diary of a forest ranger, and of course in Colin Elford I recognise the Gamekeeper who also spends his days helping to keep the balance that is required for those of us who live in such close proximity to nature red in tooth and claw.Someone else who enjoys the solitude and with a great deal of nature read in tooth and claw to contend with is Philip Connors, one time Wall Street journalist until he responded to the call of the wild...

'For nearly a decade, Philip Connors has spent half of each year in a small room at the top of a tower, on top of a mountain, alone in millions of acres of remote American wilderness. His job: to look for wildfires.'

And now the author of another wilderness read that has joined the stack, Fire Season Field Notes From a Wilderness Lookout. This is a book about fires obviously, though Philip's job is to report them rather than rush off with a hosepipe, none of which sounds too promising. But think again because it is also rich with the joys of solitude and the freedom of the independent spirit along with surprise encounters from black bears to abandoned fawns. And no picture can really convey the beauty of the cover because what looks orange is actually burnished shiny copper foil, it's a handsome looking book.

Solace by Belinda McKeon has been working its way to the top of the mountain and I will make a start the minute I am ready for another trip into Irish life. The novel has been getting consistently solid and favourable reviews as well as winning the Best Newcomer in the recent Irish Book Awards. From what I can gather Solace is about the timeless themes of love and loss with a bit of feud thrown in, the collision of the old with the new in contemporary Ireland and there will be grief for sure. I'm still recovering from my last trip into Irish writing but I'll be ready for this one any day now.

A lovely volume of poetry had also slipped into the Farrow & Ball-like autumnal pile. I wrote about Christopher Reid's A Scattering a while ago, his volume of incredibly moving elegies written after the death of his wife, so when I was standing in front of the poetry shelves at Faber Towers recently and asked if there was anything I wanted (child ...chocolate factory) Selected Poems jumped right into my hand.

Finally I think it really is time we all started using words like fopdoodle (though use with care) and dilly dally (fling that one around) again, and I am intrigued on a daily basis at the moment by The Story of English in 100 Words by David Crystal. Each entry brief enough to read while the washing is spinning or the bath's running, and you'll then want to go and off and find someone to say 'Did you know that...' and share the fact that fopdoodle is a fool (fop) and a simpleton(doodle) so a fool twice over... as I said...use with care. But the book is a wonderful conglomeration of linguistic nuggets with examples of origins, and how word use has slipped and changed or disappeared completely. How do we manage without bespirtle (to spot with vice) and fubbery (cheating) and glibbery (slippery) in these days of economic disaster, words that would all bring much needed joy and colour to Robert Peston's business news reports I feel sure.

Any suggestions that would complement this stack very gratefully received, especially books that would offer a slow, day by day read through the year.

Saturday, December 24, 2011

Thank you for all your kind Christmas wishes and this is by way of covering all bases for the card that we meant to send to so many of you and somehow Christmas Eve is upon us already. We are decorated, the tree is an over-laden confection as usual, so nothing designer about it but still very special...An accumulation of thirty-five years of our own family additions and some from my childhood too... that fairy at the top given to me at the age of three months as a Christening present, December 20th 1953.

And the bough has happened in the corner of the kitchen, thanks to the Gamekeeper who chooses and cuts it, and Bookhound who manouevres it into position whilst silently mourning the once-pristine state of his ceiling which always takes a direct hit ...And decorated this year thanks to Offspringette and a Skype video link to some sleepless friends in Christchurch, New Zealand where she had spent the first half of this year. There had been two more earthquakes in quick succession a few hours previously followed by a night of aftershocks, and the fear and anxiety of 'what may happen next' something that Offspringette understands only too well. New Zealand suggested the bough 'needed more on the right' and so that is what it got... what a lovely collaboration, and our thoughts and good wishes are with them all.

The turkey, having lived that happy free-range life is now deceased and pending, and we've had a lovely calm run up to Christmas since last Sunday evening.

Me: 'I'd really like to go to Nine Lessons and Carols tonight...'

Bookhound : 'But I'll miss Country File...'

Tsk.

So we wrapped up warm (good decision) went to call for the Tinker and walked down to the candlelit Parish Church and nabbed our pews early which was good thinking because the church was packed to the rafters (and it's huge) with extra seats at the back and standing room only. We wondered whether it is a sign of hard times and people wanting to feel part of their community. Anyway we sang our hearts out and I hit the high notes now I have done three years back in a choir and got my breathing sorted, and the church choir (the one I sang in for many years until I lapsed) sang a lovely selection of my favourite John Rutter carols too. With indecent haste we shot out after Hark the Herald and the Vicar's blessing, first in the queue to shake his hand and say 'Happy Christmas', before zooming across to the Bedford Hotel for our window seat and a pot of hot chocolate, and decided that we did indeed feel exceptionally seasonal.

Stage Two of the process will commence with Carols from King's this afternoon.

We are having another one of our £1 maximum or Home Made Christmases with extra points for innovative wrapping (expect feed sacks from the Gamekeeper) having agreed that for us Christmas has become a much anticipated mid-winter solstice time of respite from the day to day, time to stop work and hunker down as a family with some nice food, keep the home fires burning, read books, watch National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation,Danny the Champion of the World and The Railway Children and see if we can all say 'Daddy, my Daddy' at the same time, go walking, play daft games and generally re-charge our batteries. This rather than an extravagent party and present fest... we are hopelessly anti-social at Christmas. One of those years when all 'children' will be home, as in sleeping here, but I doubt we will see much of them as they catch up with friends also back in the Shire for Christmas, and the Tinker will join us on Christmas day as usual.

So how about you... all safely gathered in and as ready as you need to be??

I'll be here with the odd festive post over Christmas through to New Year because I still have books from 2011 to share, and I know every year I get e mails from those of you who may be on your own, or miles away from family and friends, saying thank you for still being there. So here's raising a glass (or cup of tea) to every one of you, and wishing you all a gentle and peaceful Christmas season with books of course.

See you on the other side of the giving, the sprouts, the Queen, the snooze, the Monopoly fight, the turkey sarnies and Downton.

Thursday, December 22, 2011

My thanks to Helen Rappaport for her wonderful Christmas in the Crimea guest blog post and also for this rather different prize draw to accompany it.

You may recall the story of Helen's discovery of the portrait of Mary Seacole which now resides in the National Portrait Gallery.The gallery collects portraits of those who have made a signifiant contribution to British life, recognising both historical importance but also popular culture and it's a place I love to visit.

The portrait of Mary Seacole was one of a set of special stamps issued on the 18th July 2006 to celebrate 150 years of the gallery, and Helen has donated three signed and stamped First Day Covers together with three signed postcards of Mary Seacole's portrait.The other portraits included in the collection of stamps are Sir Winston Churchill, Sir Joshua Reynolds, T.S.Eliot, Emmeline Pankhurst, Virginia Woolf, Sir Walter Scott, William Shakespeare, Dame Cicely Saunders (founder of the Hospice movement) and Charles Darwin so this collection and this prize something very special indeed.

Something really special to prop on your book case or tuck inside a copy of Helen's book No Place for Ladiesif you have it or can locate a copy. I can recommend it highly as a fascinating read but currently sadly out of print so you may have to chase your library... Devon have 5 copies and the audio version ...or take out a mortgage on a second-hand copy, which should be all the incentive a publisher needs to bring it back into print perhaps.

In order to spread the prizes around a little further, the first three numbers drawn by our usual random number generator method will win the First Day Covers, the second three the signed postcards. We have them here safely, they are very lovely and we will happily pack with care (Bookhound's speciality) and post to winners worldwide after Christmas.

The Crimean plain in winter is a bare, windswept and utterly unforgiving place. For the British troops who had marched off to war so optimistically early in 1854, the prospect of Christmas in the trenches before Sevastopol was a desperately bleak and cheerless one. Those who had survived the three terrible battles of Alma, Balaclava and Inkerman that autumn, or who had not by now succumbed to wounds, disease, hunger or frostbite had no respite from the cheerless environment they found themselves in.Exposed to the elements on the bare hillsides, many of the rank and file had only the most makeshift of shelters, no proper winter clothing and what they did have was by now threadbare and thick with mud. Worse, they had very little food and no wood at all to make fires to warm themselves or roast the otherwise useless green coffee beans supplied by an incompetent Army Commissariat. On duty in the trenches, the men were perpetually and intensely cold. Yet the snow was more tolerable than the drenching rain that turned their camps into a quagmire and covered them in the grimmest, most tenacious mud any of them had ever known. Their pack animals and horses were as exhausted and starved as they were and lay dead and dying all around them, while food and essential supplies even now were rotting on the quayside five miles away at Balaclava.

On Christmas Eve 1854, as he watched his men brace themselves against the weather, George Bell – Colonel of the Royal Regiment and a veteran of the Peninsula Wars – expressed his outrage at their sufferings, in words that are endlessly echoed in the letters and diaries of many other Crimean soldiers. Nothing but rain, sleet and snow: ‘1,200 men going down on duty, wet to the skin … The young lads cannot endure the fatigue,’ he wrote, ‘they lie down wet on the wet sod, unattended and shiver away their young lives in silent sorrow.’ All around men were sickening with diarrhoea, frostbite, rheumatism and severe coughs.

There were no rations for Colonel Bell’s men that Christmas Day. ‘I kicked up a dust about this neglect,’ he tells us, but what little meat finally arrived, came too late: ‘no fires, or means of cooking’. With no sign to an end of the war Bell’s prognosis was grim: ‘another twelve months will pass away, and there will be more widows and fatherless children, and weeping and lamentation’.

Back home the women of England were rallying to the defence of what an enraged Frances Anne, Lady Londonderry had described to her friend Disraeli as the willful neglect of ‘this little heroic wreck of an army’. The Queen and her daughters headed an army of women who were turning out warm mittens, scarves, gloves and socks by the score. Even on Christmas Day the knitting needles were clacking at Windsor: ‘The whole female part of this Castle, beginning with the girls and myself … are all busily knitting for the army,’ Victoria wrote with pride.

The tragedy of that first Crimean winter of course is that all the warm clothing, the prefabricated huts and tents, the all-essential food parcels that would have given the starved rank and file some consolation so far from home that miserable Christmas all arrived too late, the following spring. But spring 1855 also brought an extraordinary woman to the Crimea who rapidly became legendary there and who with her warmth and humanity, her medical skills and good home cooking soon brought the kind of creature comforts to the beleaguered troops that ensured their second Christmas on campaign would be quite different.

Mary Seacole was a one-woman band: nurse, doctress, cook, shopkeeper, entrepreneur and – most important of all – consoling mother figure. She was the only black woman to witness the war in the Crimea, indeed the first and only black woman to describe any war of the nineteenth century. In her account she brought to life with vivid, idiosyncratic candour her lone mission to be of service to Queen and country, as well as to her ‘sons’ – the men of the British Army whom she had already so loyally served as hotelier and doctress in her home town of Kingston, Jamaica.

Mrs Seacole’s on a campaign map just above the Artillery Camp, bottom left

From her endearingly but absurdly named ‘British Hotel’ – a collection of ramshackle huts and outbuildings located about two miles inland from Balaclava towards the front lines – Mary Seacole set up a home-from-home offering general supplies, a range of alcohol (from beer to champagne) and hot dinners to both officers and the rank and file. Her establishment soon became known as ‘Mrs Seacole’s’ as word rapidly spread across the Crimea of the kindness and generosity of its energetic and enterprising proprietor. In addition to her culinary offerings Mary ran a daily surgery for the sick and wounded, where they could get free medical treatment (subsidised by the well-off officers who bought her champagne). As an accomplished and experienced nurse, Mary could deal with anything from cholera and diarrhoea, to frostbite, to extracting a bullet and stitching a wound.

The Crimea that Christmas was transformed: ‘I think there was something purely and essentially English in the determination of the camp to spend the Christmas-day of 1855 after the good old “home” fashion,’ Mary later wrote. All over the Crimea the food parcels were pouring in – Christmas cakes miraculously arrived unscathed all the way from doting families back home; officers with money could buy food hampers from Oppenheim’s and Fortnum’s who had by now set up shop in the Crimea. Huts were festooned with artificial flowers and decorations made of coloured tissue paper, bows of bright calico and spruce and fir branches. Some soldiers rode out in search of mistletoe that grew in abundance on wild pear and apple trees. Across the tented camps of the peninsula there were parties and theatricals (with dresses loaned by Mrs Seacole for officers performing in drag) and even balls at which the few army wives in the Crimea took centre stage.

As for Christmas dinner – although wild turkeys were found in the Crimea, there was also an indigenous bird – the bustard (apparently a tasty cross between woodcock and wild duck) and hunting parties were out in the run up to the festival, bagging as many as possible for the occasion. Mary herself had one for sale – so the British press reported – weighing nineteen and a half pounds.

In the weeks before Christmas she was besieged with demands for festive fare – especially her plum puddings and mince pies – as she recalled in her 1857 memoirs, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands: ‘I can fancy that if returns could be got at of the flour, plums, currants, and eggs consumed on Christmas-day in the out-of-the-way Crimean peninsula, they would astonish us.’

In the days before Christmas Mary was found ‘deep in the mysteries of baking and boiling’ by one army chaplain. From early in the morning till long after nightfall, she and her two black cooks worked flat out to fulfill her many orders. And it didn’t stop there; on New Year’s Day she baked another large batch of puddings and mince pies and took them to the sick and wounded in the nearby hospital of the Land Transport Corps.

This was just one of many acts of kindness freely made by Mary Seacole that Christmas ‘to remind the patients of the home comforts they longed so much for.’ No wonder the men in the Crimea all loved her and spread the fame of her legendary good works when they returned home to England. At Christmas, of all times, Mary Seacole’s humanity and simple Christian charity shone through; they were – and remain – an example to us all.

My thanks to Lynne for inviting me to write this special Christmas blog, and to all dovegreyreader followers for their interest in and support for my work. Happy Christmas! Helen Rappaport

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

If you recall that chair I was coveting from Angie Lewin's design company St Jude's a while back, then it was a fortuitous wander around their website that also alerted me to the forthcoming limited edition of Volume One of the St Jude's design journal to be known as Random Spectacular. I had already spent ages coveting the fabrics on the site before very naughtily cutting off a virtual yard of Mark Hearld's 'Doveflight' fabric in grey as the obvious and only suitable background for my Twitter page, and I am grateful to Mark for designing it especially for me. (I'm sure)

But I can rarely resist a design-based journal, though finances dictate that I really should. I adore Selvedge and buy a copy whenever I see it and have the £10 lurking and unspoken for and it all segues perfectly into a book from Thames & Hudson that I have been enjoying for a while now.

'Looking' books are on an equal footing with those 'journey' books we were talking about on Monday I think, and in terms of value just keep on giving, and The New Artisans by Olivier Dupon is a treasure trove for anyone who warms to the notion of restoring noble status to the very word 'artisan'.

'Highly talented crafters around the world have been working laboriously and passionately, experimenting with techniques and materials, to produce high quality, modern, desirable, one-off objects of creation...History, vision and feeling are incorporated into each and every piece, and that clearly distinguished these products from mass-produced goods.'

Sounds (and is) poles apart from my selection of home-made Christmas gifts this year (can't reveal for obvious reasons) but there was nothing I was going to dislike about a book whose production values are stellar and which shares page after page of inspiration with me. I plan to share much more of this book and the designers, their goods and their websites on here through next year... in the meantime, it's obvious I would love Andrea Williamson who had stopped me in my tracks by page ten.

So I could see no harm in at least enjoying the first edition of Random Spectacular and giving something back to assuage my guilt for making off with that yard of virtual fabric, whilst getting some inspiration and wonderful colours and designs for the back of my eye in these dark and chilly winter months. I instinctively knew I wouldn't be disappointed; Angie Lewin's designs have really come to my attention on book jackets this year and they sit very comfortably with my gaze....and talking of artisans, my thanks to Fran H-B for those hand-crafted snowflakes in with the card...yes indeed, move over Kirsty Allsop:-)

Published in a limited edition of 750 copies and with profits being donated to Maggie's Cancer Caring Centres, I signed up for the St Jude's notification e mail and then kept a track on Twitter for news of publication, because I had a feeling these would sell very quickly indeed. Up came the tweet last week, my order was placed within minutes and as I had thought Random Spectacular No 1 had sold out by the next day. News spread quickly that this was indeed spectacular and disappointed buyers gnashed their teeth, whilst I held my breath hoping mine would arrive...which it did last Saturday.

This is clearly a wonderful collaboration showcasing a wealth of design, artistic and writing talent that creates a truly spectacular and very harmonious whole. But one to single out... to my pleasant surprise Ed Kluz, the artist whose illustrations first drew me intoA History of England in 100 Places.

So here are just a few sneak pics from my copy to share with you, a feast for your winter (or summer for those in Oz) eyes too and on or around the Winter Solstice.

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

So I read it and loved it and it's weeks since I finished it, but I haven't stopped thinking about Clare Tomalin's magnificent Charles Dickens - A Life.

I doubt a day goes by at the moment without some reference to the Dickens 200 and the website is well worth exploring if you don't want to miss any of it. I'm back in London in March and have a list of exhibitions to see including a visit to the house in Doughty Street and the Museum of London's Dickens and London which I have on good authority is excellent, and a must-see.

Has anyone else seen it yet...or planning a visit??

And I am poring over the Christmas schedules to make sure I don't miss anything, especially the new BBC three part adaptation of Great Expectations currently being advertised to the music of Leontovych's Carol of the Bells, completely haunting and catching my attention every time I hear it, so it might as well catch yours too...

And might Great Expectations be my favourite Dickens' book after Our Mutual Friend??

I'm still not sure I have read enough of them to decide but I did read Claire Tomalin's book with an idea that I would see if I could tell which her favourite might be, but true to Hilary Mantel's observation on the back cover..

'Claire Tomalin is the finest and most disinterested of biographers.'

...well I couldn't second guess so I'm relieved to have seen a television interview where I'm sure Great Expectations snatched Claire Tomalin's vote.

There is no idolatory here, no judgement passed and the whole felt sufficiently non-directive to allow space for the reader to think for themselves too, perhaps draw a few conclusons of their own which I like a biography to allow me to do. An excellent well-balanced journey through the life of undeniably our most famous author whose bi-centenary we are celebrating... and yet for all his gifts and my admiration for the novels I just can't help but have misgivings about the man.

I sensed ultimately a fear of entrapment. Every employment situation that required commitment led to eventual extrication so little wonder that the entrapment of serial writing caused such stress in his life. Whilst two more aspects struck me as disingenuous, the first, the obvious hot potato about Dickens' behaviour towards his wife Catherine and his children. Catherine permanently pregnant and discarded when prettier young blooms in the shape of Nelly Tiernan arrived, but also the children. The poor children who seemed to have a performer for a father, one who was writing like crazy to keep his family afloat, but alongside emerged the impression of Dickens as the extrovert who needed to be the centre of attention with all he did and with everyone he knew.

Eventually no one but no one stole Charles Dickens' limelight.

Worse, and no matter how hard I try to bury it I can't help but sense that his philanthropy was of that slightly self-serving variety, charity that needed to be noticed. So the more extreme and seemingly insurmountable the cause the better for all the attention it would draw ..like the fallen women of London, or the plight of the city's children.

I'm feeling bad for making such a call, especially given that I trained at the hospital he helped to found, and where he may still be mentioned in reverential tones, but it has all been sufficient to make me want to reappraise some student nurse brain-washing and read Jules Kosky's book again... Mutual Friends - Charles Dickens and Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital in the light of my new knowledge.

Emotionally labile, impulsive, one moment effusive, the next withdrawn, driven by a work ethic that would keep him at the centre of a world that revolved around him, a childlike trait that Charles Dickens seems to have cultured for his entire life, a man who needed to be needed, and needed to be loved, and by as many people as possible. An audience was required 'to nourish his spirit'.

Claire Tomalin is nothing but frank and honest and very much on the case as Nelly moves into the picture...

'... the darkest part of his character was summoned up. He was ready to be cruel to his wife. A raging anger broke out at any opposition to his wishes. He used lies as weapons of attack and defence. His displays of self-righteousness were shocking. He was determined to be in the right about everything. He must have known he was not but he had lost his judgement. The spectacle of a man famous for his goodness and his attachment to domestic virtues suddenly losing his moral compass is dismaying.'

All I can sense is that this was barely concealed all along and it's interesting to speculate quite what opprobium the media of today would rain down on such behaviour... would Charles Dickens be a national treasure??

So thanks to Claire Tomalin I have a renewed perspective on Charles Dickens, one still laced with the utmost respect for the writing and its legacy, and much respect for the skills of a biographer who may have wanted to cry as she wrote...

'In September 1860 he performed a ritual act. ridding himself of the past by burning thousands of letters accumulated over the years on a bonfire at Gad's Hill. His appointed biographer, Forster, was not consulted.'

Dickens had much to hide it would seem, perhaps much of which he was ashamed, and much we will never quite know for sure, including events on the day of his demise which I had quite thought was the stroke on the sofa finale. In fact Claire Tomalin suggests that Dickens may well have been taken ill at Nelly's home, was bundled unconscious into a two-horse brougham and sent home to die at Gad's Hill.

If the eyes have it, this single picture expresses more than a million words in my mind....there is kindness but there is a self-reflecting sadness too, a pleading sort of melancholy.

Eventually buried in Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey apparently against his wishes (which seems very out of character with the Dickens I had come to know throughout this book) and with just fourteen mourners present, no singing, no eulogy, just the words of the burial service. A tragically strange and underwrought departure at odds with the man who loved to be centre stage and worshipped, and all sufficient to make me wonder whether perhaps in his ending and his clear instructions for how it would be managed, Dickens was finally facing up to and acknowledging to himself the truth about his flaws. Did he see himself as ultimately undeserving of the respect and the audience he had sought and courted all his life, thus denying any opportunity for the public displays of mourning which his death would surely engender??

I am so pleased that I have read this book before the Dickens 200 really swings into action because I suspect I may have been drawn into the myth which as Claire Tomalin argues, Dickens had desecrated himself by his own behaviour. I have two feet firmly on the ground, romantic notions dispelled, and remarkably reading Charles Dickens - A Life has left me mad keen and wanting to launch yet another attempt on the mountain upon which I have been left impaled and floundering at base camp for about the last four Christmases.

Yes it's time to rope up for Bleak House Summit Attempt No 5, and this time I'm quietly hopeful. I have already passed all those heaps of previously discarded equipment and moved on from Tulkinghorne - Dedlock base camp, stared up at the North Wall of the Jarndyce and have just traversed the Jellyby crevasse. I'm roped up and on my way and the conditions seem favourable.

Monday, December 19, 2011

'Before we begin to eat, Herman pours out glasses of prosecco and I give a little speech. I say that I hope everyone will like the book if it is eventually translated into Italian and that being here in the valley has made me think that time past and time present and time future is like a vast landscape and we are walking through it on a tracery of thin paths. To my surprise everyone says, yes, it's true, and they burst out clapping.'

Having met Penelope Lively on that memoir writing course it was my delight to discover that the other tutor was Julia Blackburn, there with husband Herman Makkink, and Thin Paths the book, in its infancy, that Julia described during her tutorials in France in that September of 2008. I loved The Three of Us , and Julia had also sat in the dovegreyreader asks...armchair so I had been really looking forward to this one.

It is now the summer of 2010, the book is complete and the guests are gathered on the terrace of Julia and Herman's home high in the mountains of Liguria . Armando and Ida, Adriana and her daughter Eliana and the baby along with the ghosts of Arturo and Old Tunin and La Muta and me too ...well it felt like it, in spirit at least, having travelled those thin paths of memory alongside them. All the people that I have come to know during the six months I have been reading Thin Paths - Journeys in and Around an Italian Village.

I have been watching too much Strictly (Come Dancing) of late, where the 'journey' word has become the cliche that makes even Claudia Winkleman groan, and so I heaved out the enormous Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary just to see if I could find another word... peregrination (1548)... fizgig (1594) ... scoterlope (1583)... scamander (1864) perhaps. I wanted something to describe my own travels with this book because now I have turned the final page I do feel as if I am at the end of...a.... a..... well it will have to stay as a journey. You might remember that wonderful literary 'journey' we took to Italy on here back in June, so many wonderful reading suggestions from you all and I have travelled little further than this single book, but it has been a complete and very fulfilling trip in itself.

Journey books are just the best value, those books that you pick up whenever you feel like it and wander through a few more pages of landscape and people who become so familiar. With no rush to finish, a book like this becomes a treasure, and in fact time and space seems to be written into these pages to linger and ponder, to walk slowly.

Thin Paths is a collection of personal and community memories about life in the Italian mountains, each piece just a few pages long, the text interspersed with black and white photos (and my thanks to Julia for these colour ones, this the view from the terrace of their mountain home) Thin Paths travels to the heart of a remote community. A supportive community and not only with regard to present-day troubles but also the tribulations of the past, because this is about recollections of the life of the partisans fighting the Germans and Mussolini in these mountains during the Second World War. How a community copes with conflict, treachery, betrayal, illness, death, starvation (you will never ignore a chestnut again) and poverty... but don't be alarmed because this isn't misery. Julia has a calm and measured inflection to her narrative voice which can convey such details with huge respect and sensitivity for the people, the landscape, their traditions and ultimately huge respect for what they choose not to say, so no over-dramatising; it's unnecessary, the impact is sufficiently profound in its simplicity blending with the whole seamlessly to create a really beautiful and moving book.

Celebration and mourning reflect life and sit side by side, along with humour and a real love of the landscape and the people, whilst giving a real insight into life under occupation. Lives and homes infiltrated by soldiers with all the indignity and concealed resentment as they take your best rooms, your food, your warmth plundering the lives, the minds and the pride of those you love. Yet there is that sense of an indomitable spirit of survival despite the often futile attempts at retaliation, the merciless punishments and the overwhelming sense of helplessness... and as Julia gains their confidence and learns their language (from scratch) her neighbours confide their deepest memories, the pain long-buried in the way that those who have suffered during war so often do for their own sanity.

I often liken it to a suitcase full of crumpled washing, one that can become a heavier burden the more years you carry it around. To open the lid and look inside becomes even more frightening, because what if you couldn't get it all back in again...then what. But I sense a relief amongst those Julia has talked to, a lightening of that burden shared with someone who will listen, and who in turn will share it with many many more who will do likewise. And for Armando who writes his stories each night only to burn them the next morning, there is still that sense of a powerful release.

There is a gentleness and enchantment to Julia's writing. I find it magical to read, poetic and meaningful, carefully chosen words to create something very exact. Julia observes nature like no other, the only person I have ever met who can willingly pick up a slug, stroke it and love it, and so her observations about the natural world that surrounds her mountain home are pitch perfect ... as is the tent, because Julia and Herman walk the terrain and camp out frequently. Nature weaves a wonderfully timeless thread throughout Thin Paths, somehow grounding everything that has happened in people's lives with an unchanging permanence.

And then there are moments that made me want to stop and think about the implications of something that may have been told at a slant.

There is a moment with a cake, cooked for Adriana by the wife of a German man who lives locally. Whilst Julia looks on Adriana protests that she doesn't like it,

'and she makes a sweeping gesture with her hand over the cake as if she hopes it might disappear...'

As the conversation draws to a close and Julia tries some of the cake...

'Adriana watches me eating it to see if it tastes as good as it looks.'

And the chapter ends...and I know so much from what has not been said, and from what hasn't happened, about whether Adriana will ever be able to forgive the German atrocities she witnessed as a child in these occupied mountains.

Adriana will be unfailingly polite and accept their cake, but she doesn't have to eat it.

The far-reaching impact of Adriana's childhood fear is plain to see, and the fact that Julia has dedicated the book to her surely a testament to one woman's courage and tenacity.

Within Thin Paths, but not overtly so, Julia and Herman also walk the narrow path of illness following Herman's diagnosis with throat cancer, but this is lightly done with a fortitude and humour that surely belies the fear and anxiety, and as you can see Herman is in fine form, (read more about Herman Makkink here)But like every aspect of this book there is perspective and containment in the words of illness, all of which makes the reading even more powerful...the 'what is not said' echoed and reverberated again and again as I read.

On reflection neither am I surprised that Edmund de Waal chose Thin Paths as his Book of 2011 because its trail through 'the present moment of the long ago past' chimes wonderfully with The Hare With Amber Eyes, the book I read in a similar journeying way for the first six months of this year.

What a grace-filled year of reading I have had from these two books alone.

Saturday, December 17, 2011

No not Clarissa wearing Penguin Shorts...sorry, all will become clear.

'Bring me a brace of pheasant my good man' I said to the Gamekeeper the other day.

He looked as me a little askance because we could trip over pheasant here and I don't usually pay too much attention.

'Minus the feathers and the innards of course,' I added,

'Because I have a late fifteenth century recipe for game casserole and I'm in the mood to try it. The mood will have passed by Wednesday so be quick....and bring some red wine in with them.'

In fact the birds only shuffled off their mortal coil yesterday, and then have to hang until they are almost coming back to life but I am readying the cinnamon, cloves, saffron and ginger etc.

I am reading A History of English Food by Clarissa Dickson Wright and I am liking it. I have had a soft spot for Clarissa since those Two Fat Ladies days, and then listening to her reading her autobiography,Spilling the Beans.

I'm not a great one for food writing, or cookery books, or reality chef TV, though even I was riveted by the Masterchef semi-final this week. It's the music mainly isn't it, really cranks up the anxiety to fever pitch. Will Steve's jellies make the transition from cold room, up in the lift to the heat of the main kitchen, and get plated up without melting and thence to thirty of the nation's top chefs for eating. I was beside myself with worry for Steve's jellies, and then Michel Roux offers that piercing gaze and does some chivvying and that ought to be enough to have jelly on the ceiling. I tell you I was exhausted by the end. We missed the final but our virtual money would have been on eventual winner Ash who stirred things with both hands, took a direct hit in the eye with some boiling oil, stuck his head under the cold tap and just kept going.

Clarissa's tome romps through from the cuisine of the Crusades right up to the present-day and thus far I am finding the book fascinating, engaging and very lovely to pick up and read after a stint of fiction. I've already learnt the origins of eating Umble Pie. The umbles were the kidney, liver, lights, hearts, testicles and parts of the tripe left over when a deer had been killed and the select cuts had gone off to the select people, leaving the bits and bobs for the huntsmen or the beaters on the shoot. If I tell you that on yesterday's shoot the Gamekeeper, with his father Bookhound the Beater in tow, lunched on pheasant and leek pie followed by a delicious coconut and almond tart with custard then you can see that the days of Umble Pie for beaters are long gone here.

I will carry on ambling through A History of English Food because flicking ahead I can see news (to me) that curlew, lapwing and lark should be served with salt, sugar and water, whilst sparrows and thrushes require salt and cinnamon to taste their best (Tudors) and a cracking recipe coming up for calves feet (Elizabethans) and I love Clarissa's informed but humourous tone, just right for a non-serious foodie like me.

Meanwhile my attentions have been also drawn a little closer to the season, and thanks to the arrival of a Kobo e reader from Penguin loaded with the new selection of Penguin Shorts I have been able to see what I think of a touch screen e reader whilst reading Felicity Cloake's Perfect Christmas Day 15 Essential Recipes for The Perfect Christmas. The Penguin Shorts are billed as a 21st century legacy of those early days of Penguin Books which offered affordable, quality books for a mass audience, and for the cost of a cup of coffee these latest editions for e reader are taking up the cudgels in the busy digital books market. I of course am the only numpty not to have noticed that Kobo is an anagram of Book, but I have no complaints about the very readable touch screen which saves all that energy wasted pressing the page forward button, whilst the battery charge life seems to be everlasting. Having originated in Canada ( I think) this is the e-reader now supported by W.H.Smith's and clearly an attempt to challenge the Kindle juggernaut (a million Kindles a month being sold... a million...). I haven't got as far as registering it yet, or seeing what else may be available because when I do I will lose the Penguin Shorts and I am enjoying them, but I'll let you know my further Kobo thoughts eventually.

Priced at £1.99 the Penguin Shorts are designed to be read over a 'long commute or a short journey' or in a lunch hour and as a means of providing a new angle on an old subject, or a new subject or perhaps a short story. Interestingly I discover that Shorts can also be produced very quickly, within four weeks of commissioning a work, so the series could be very contemporaneous, a slew of writers are working on them and we are also promised essays. I for one would relish more essays so I like the sound of all this and will be keeping a close watch.

But enough of that we have Christmas dinner to think on. Felicity Cloake runs through all the basic Christmas recipes on the basis that many of us are welded to our traditions and have a hard fight to persuade the family into new ones, so we might as well do what we do as well as possible. Mulled wine, prawn cocktail, sage and onion stuffing, bread sauce, pigs in blankets, turkey the lot. Each recipe offers a resume of past and present methods and comes up with the best. Now I don't cook the Christmas dinner here, Bookhound does it but I have read out the muslin steeped in melted butter and draped over the turkey for the duration method and he'll give it a go, so we'll see what happens.

Felicity Cloake says this and it rings true here...

'Some Christmas traditions deserve to be quietly laid to rest, and the turkey thing is long past its sell-by daye. We all eat turkey. We all complain about turkey. Well, it's time to man up and opt for something else instead or finally learn how to cook this majestically sized bird properly.'

Every year we say we'll have beef...or a goose, and every year our turkey finds its way home. Ours is still trotting around. The Gamekeeper has been to visit it and says it has been living a happy and fulfilled free-range, rural life and they will read it poetry in its final minutes, so we can eat it safe in that knowledge, which I find always helps.

Thursday, December 15, 2011

Right, so the first thing to be very clear on is that The Fear Index is about the world of finance... DON'T ALL RUSH OFF.

I can't even feign the vaguest interest in or understanding of hedge funds, and liquidating shorts and futures, and this despite Robert Harris's painstaking inclusion of some explanations in his latest novel. It all really did pass right over my head, but this is a thriller and this is Robert Harris so none of that matters because everything else more than makes up for a bit of financial ennui.

There is much debate around the social networking sites this week concerning Alice Oswald's withdrawal from the T.S.Eliot poetry prize, on the grounds that funding is coming from sources connected to hedge funds. Whilst I don't pretend to understand the implications or the whys I will always respect anyone who makes a decision of conscience, and to be frank, if you read The Fear Index you might be a little chary of hedge funds too... but then this is fiction... isn't it?

Dr Alex Hoffmann is the Midas man, I'd have him slightly on the autistic spectrum for his rather sparse social skills combined with a brilliant computer brain. He's married to Gabrielle, an artist and his complete antithesis in accordance with the theory of Opposites Attract, and yet in some ways Alex's skills are extremely creative. Transferable skills have seen him move from work on the development of the CERN Large Hadron Collider into setting up his own Geneva-based company, Hoffman Investment Technologies, utilising his own self-managing computerised algorithmic trading programme.

Yes, I can see everyone's eyes glazing over fast... someone's even yawning, slap yourself around the chops and hang on in there with me, we can do this. Look there's a really interesting picture of the Hadron Collider to perk you up ... alright I know it remains a mystery, even though Professor Brian Cox had a good go at explaining things on the news this week. Gosh, if I even vaguely understood the thing I'll bet I could have made some really intelligent analogies about the collision of exploding particles within Robert Harris's narrative arc or something, but you'll just have to read it and find those for yourselves.

Hoffman's life slowly unravels when it appears that someone has infiltrated his own security systems and stolen his identity. His money is being spent for him, he seems to be sending invitations to things he can't remember inviting people to and there are hints that he may be suffering from the early stages of some form of memory-loss or dementia. Meanwhile it would seem nothing but nothing can stop his algorithm from making money. The computer is in charge and with minimal human interference is left to decide all financial transactions, recognising and analysing market trends and sometimes, with split-second timing, buying and selling stocks and shares and making billions for the company. In the poorly regulated world of finance the algorithm's power goes unchallenged, to say nothing of its ethics, and then of course you start to question exactly whose ethics they are.

This is toxic and unimaginable wealth shared amongst the privileged few; wealth on a scale it is hard to take in and a financial world ruthlessly immoral in its pursuit of the next billion (which can be made in about ten seconds). Men blinded by the money-making process and of course it is all going to end in tears. But forget any potential for boredom here because this is a pacey thriller that had me thinking on a regular basis 'I can't believe I am enjoying this book so much.' It is about the enfeebling nature of technology too and about the dependency on systems that are fallible and can fail, but at a point when human intervention may have been eroded and disempowered to such an extent that any hope of recovery and extrication is impossible. So the book is full of possibilities in reality too, and given the state of the world's finances right now the scare factor is that none of it seems beyond the realms of the imagination, even for a financial market klutz like me, who is beginning to think she might be able to afford to buy Greece this week and Italy next with some spare Tesco Clubcard vouchers.

The twist when it comes is unexpected and clever, well it was for me, and left me knowing that I had just read a really good book and it was time to seek out some more Robert Harris because I'm a bit out of touch with his recent writing. Even though I was an early adopter of Enigma, Archangel and Fatherland Robert Harris seems to have mysteriously dropped off my radar whilst writing his Cicero Trilogy, Pompeii, Lustrum and Imperium (not necessarily in that order) and I never really caught up again, so I've Kindled some samples of those to see if I might enjoy them.

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

You may have noticed a sidebar titled 'Watching...' over here >>>>>>>> and it may then be obvious that, along with the multitudes, I have succumbed to the tempation of the £20 Amazon gift voucher if I took out a one month trial subscription to LoveFilm. I could reserve three films in that time and if I didn't like it I could cancel the subscription before I paid the £5.99 fee.

With the £20 Amazon voucher burning a hole in my computer screen I invested in a boxed set of all Jacqueline Du Pre's cello recordings. Seventeen sublime discs which have been playing non-stop in the Bookroom as I work and play.

Now getting to the cinema is quite a palava from here. We do have a local Arts Centre and I know a few people who read here and who love it and support it. I would if the seats were more comfortable, but fifteen minutes into a film my back is killing me, Bookhound's feet are under his chin and we have the sweet paper rustlers fore and aft, so we walk out at the end all irritable and bent double and are hobbling around for a week afterwards. Nearest after that would be Plymouth and not much change from £50 for a night out, so this £5.99 a month for three films arriving in the post and viewed from the comfort of my sofa seemed quite appealing.

I didn't get off to a particularly auspicious start because having settled down to watch The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, the first in the Stieg Larsson series, it quickly became apparent that I had ordered The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by mistake, the third and final film in the series. Now this was all fine for me because I had at least read Book One so could get the drift, but I made a quick decision not to own up to Bookhound, who had reluctantly started watching in a fog of confusion and then drifted in and out of consciousness for the rest of the film. So we have made the decision that I won't try and please the pair of us with my selections. I'll just wallow in a vat of nostalgia on a winter's afternoon, with a pot of tea and some knitting, and catch up on everything he hasn't really wanted to see.

My rental list currently stands at fourteen films in the queue and I'm having a lovely time, and I suspect there may only be about two people out there who haven't seen these next two films.

Julie and Julia was a complete delight as a young woman in New York decides, whilst in a spate of the doldrums, to cook every recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Childs within a year and to blog about it. So cue some five hundred recipes, a husband who keeps saying 'You won't put that on the blog will you' and the parallel life of Julia Childs as she was writing the book in the 1950s, and played magnificently by Meryl Streep... and you have the makings of a really enjoyable film, some of which I could identify with (not the recipes, not the book writing). It was delightfully funny and completely absorbing, the lives of two women trying to find their feet in alien worlds, Julia as the travelling diplomat's wife, Julie in a post 9/11 New York city. And with the food as a central character, seriously hilarious when it came to the murder cooking of the lobsters and best not to have any chocolate in the house or there would be precisely none by the end of this film.

The Devil Wears Prada was actually not on my rental list, it's been lurking here for ages, but now that I don't have to ring up a child to tell me how to work the new DVD machine, and having realised it wasn't working because the scart lead had fallen out of the back. I've been round the back of the television and probed the morass of wires which takes a lot of guts I can tell you, so I'm good to go and getting a bit more adventurous. But it also demonstrates how woefully far behind I am with the film world...2006 to be precise for this one. More Meryl the Magnificent as Miranda Priestly, the glamorously ego-centric editor-in-chief of Runway magazine. Miranda the high-priestess who runs the world fashion scene with a nod, a shake of the head or a pursing of the lips, and inexplicably and most reluctantly takes on a rather geeky-looking deputy personal assistant who to her horror is 'fat' at a size 6 and with little dress sense. Andrea reluctantly starts to fit into a world she has held in disdain, enjoys dressing accordingly whilst being at Miranda's beck and call and unwittingly slaying the opposition, namely the head personal assistant. But of course Andrea will have to decide whether to be true to herself and take arms against a sea of Chanel or live in this overtly aggressive world.

But just how does Meryl the Magnificent do it??

I know she's an actor and that's what they are supposed to do well, but two entirely different film roles played to perfection... the whacky, quirky, eccentric Julia Childs and the cool, elegant understated Miranda Priestly and perfect comic timing in both. And it would seem Meryl can make herself look, sound and talk like just about anyone, we have her much-vaunted take on Margaret Thatcher to come.

Yes, I love our Meryl and I love LoveFilm, here's my rental list so far and I would really welcome some more suggestions from you. I doubt I will have seen it.

The King's SpeechMildred PierceRevolutionary Road (next up)Enchanted AprilA Handful of DustGirl With a Pearl EarringThe English Patient (have seen this before but ages ago)Children of a Lesser GodVera DrakePossessionAnother CountryA Handful of DustTea With MussoliniThe Wind That Shakes the BarleyTwenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky

and some of your suggestions copied from comments so you can cut and paste ...thank you!

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop CafeSteel MagnoliasA Room with a ViewThe Flight of the Red BalloonThe Red BalloonIt's ComplicatedStrictly BallroomAmelieBig NightBull DurhamGood Night and Good LuckShadowlandsThe Belstone FoxTess (Polanski version)Testament of YouthDeep Blue SeaBalck Swan ArchipelagoBagdad CafeParis TexasMetropolisRanHairsprayA Fish Called WandaTerminalInnocenceMcCabe and Mrs MillerWings of DesireBicentennial ManThe PianistLife is Beautiful84 Charing Cross RoadInto the WildMrs BrownThe Bucket ListChariots of FireRemains of the DayAtonementCrossing Delancey The Station Agent The VisitorThe ReaderAn EducationThe ChorusPaint Your WagonThe NativityLiving in the Material WorldGosford ParkWinter's BoneIl PostinoCinema ParadisoPriscilla Queen of the DesertThe Shawshank RedemptionLet the Right One InTruly Madly DeeplyFanny and AlexanderThe OthersSissi Out of AfricaMrs Palfrey at the ClaremontThe House of Sand and FogThe Age of InnocenceShakespeare in LoveDirty, Pretty ThingsDie Marquise von OKluteWoman on the Verge of a Nervous BreakdownHilary and JackieEasy VirtueThe Last StationEat, Drink, Man, Woman The Story of the Weeping Camel Tous les matins du monde Wings of Desire Downfall The Lives of Others I've loved you so long Hidden Notes on a Scandal Another YearThe American PresidentMrs Harris Goes to ParisBright StarPreciousMidnight in ParisThe White RibbonCaptain Corelli's MandolinThe September IssueMamma MiaEtre et AvoirHouse of AngelsJour de FeteM.Hulot's HolidayFurOscar and LucindaOut of AfricaThe Illusionist (Sylvain Chomet)Belville RendezvousMax and MaryAs It Is In HeavenKeeping MumThe Help

Monday, December 12, 2011

It was my good fortune to meet Penelope Lively back in 2008 when I was invited to take dovegreyreader scribbles to a memoir-writing course in France. I have long been a devotee of her writing so that rates as 'one of those moments' and it was a pleasure to get to know Penelope a little better through the week, and to listen as she talked about her life and her writing.

I always make a point of travelling to hear Penelope speak if she is down this way and to say hello to her afterwards, and though I've said it here before, it is worth repeating. Penelope Lively is a consummate public speaker, measured, graceful and assured and always but endlessly fascinating to listen to. I always come away quietly inspired and renewed, informed about literature and writing, and raring to follow some new trails.

So me eyes light up when a new Penelope Lively novel arrives, especially since someone somewhere has thought carefully about this and given her book jackets a wonderfully refreshing lease of life. I've spent ages looking at this one. I want to sit in that chair because perhaps it was me who left that copy of What Maisie Knew open at the page whilst I went off and made that cup of tea. And I have pored over the books on the shelves because they are there for a reason...as is Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, all of which will become clear if you decide to read How It All Began.

Penelope Lively has taken the theory of the Butterfly Effect and translated it into human lives with all its unpredictabilities, from the moment that retired teacher Charlotte is mugged and finds herself face down on the pavement. Daughter Rose, PA to the ageing Henry, will have to be informed. In which case Henry will now need his sister Marion to escort him to that lecture he is giving in Manchester instead, which means Marion's date with her lover Jeremy will have to be cancelled. Thus does Stella hear the text arriving on husband Jeremy's mobile phone and thence do lives unravel.

And with wry, funny moments and wonderful contrasts.

The two ageing characters, Charlotte and Henry and the frailties of increasing years mixed in with the life certainties that age offers. As Charlotte reflects on her situation Penelope Lively defines her past as the 'abiding ballast without which she would capsize' and Charlotte revisits it with appreciation. Both characters are perfect mediums for an exploration of the reluctance to go gentle into that good night, as Charlotte yearns to be back living independently in her own home rather than hobbling around on crutches at her daughter's home. Henry meanwhile, resolutely trapped in his academic past, remains oblivious to any notion that time may have passed him by, or that his popularity may have waned....and for heaven's sake why on earth won't the BBC give him one of those talking heads TV series, he feels sure the nation still adores him.

The younger characters still have much to learn, the slimey Jeremy (who I really would have been happy to see buried alive under a pile of his own reclaimed marble fireplaces), the disempowered and helpless wife Stella who, bolstered by family and solicitor, embarks on a rather wavering divorce. Then there's go-getter mistress Marion, whose interior design business becomes embroiled with a con man, alongside the will-she won't-she drama of giving up on the slimey Jeremy. Charlotte's daughter Rose and shadowy predictable husband Gerry... and then Anton, the immigrant who Charlotte is teaching English, all of them at points in their lives when there is still time to change direction, and all perfectly plotted and executed by Penelope Lively as I wondered which route they might all take.

What is more compelling is the meticulous way that Penelope Lively writes it all out. Characters came to the fore and were delicately fleshed out with enlightening and subtle detail and I became increasingly engrossed as I listened in on their innermost thoughts. Any writer struggling to bring characters to life on the page would benefit from the master class that How It All Began provides. This isn't showy bells and whistles writing, this is good,solid storytelling as the vulnerabilities are quietly exposed, the chinks and cracks in everyone's armour explored and exploited to the full, and those deliciously juicy warts-and-all aspects of human nature exhibited for all to see.

There's a wonderful explanation of why life speeds up as you get older too,

'...by a psychologist, which attempted to explain the phenomenon... One persuasive explanation is to do with the changed nature of experience itself; when we are young novelty abounds. We do, see, feel, taste, smell newly, day after day; this puts a brake on time. It hovers while we savour each fresh moment. In old age, we've seen it all, to put it bluntly. Been there, done that. So time whisks by...'

And on that subject please confirm that I am not the only one who feels they have only just become accustomed to writing 2011...

It all makes me want to go back and revisit Penelope Lively's earlier books, which I haven't read for years and so I plan to do that slowly. This is a writer in complete control of her art, still very much at the top of her game and How It All Began a worthy and highly recommended addition to any Must Read list.

Any more devotees out there with a favourite Penelope Lively novel to recommend to others??

Each immaculate twelve-page poetry collection is themed (dogs, cats, tea, birds, bicycles, puddings, lovely unusual things that will mean and convey something to both givers and recipients) and at £4.95 as reasonable as any gift card, and far better perhaps for being the card that keeps on giving rather than the one that goes in the bin.

Jenny (or someone, thank you whoever anyway) sent me some of these back in 2008 when they first came out and I still have them here in the Poetry Dresser having always meant to send them onto people, because these are meant for sharing. And even more exciting to read about the Candlestick Press collaboration with Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, who has undertaken to contribute a selection The Twelve Poems of Christmas every Christmas for the years of her tenure.

Poetry has featured very large in my daily reading this year. Several collections that have captured my heart and my imagination and several poets who have secured their comfy armchair in my personal pantheon of Greats.

It was a revisit of The World's Wife for the A Good Read performance that brought Carol Ann Duffy right back into perspective for me, as well as The Bees of course. I have been reading Selected Poems throughout the year too and doubt I go many days now without reading something by Carol Ann because I keep this volume, with its distinctive Angie Lewin cover design, on my desk and at my right hand.Alice Oswald is now part of my furniture too, and huge admiration to her for holding to her principles and the stance she has taken over the funding of the T.S.Eliot prize by withdrawing from the short list. I think it takes a particular sort of courage these days to look £15,000 in the eye, that you were in with a chance of winning, and turn your back on it. Dart remains a treasure and I have become much more familiar with Woods etc through this year too. I have Alice Oswald's latest collection Memorial, with the CD of Alice reading it, set aside for Christmas listening.

And talking of T.S.Eliot I have focused on getting to know Four Quartets this year. Shame on me for not reading it properly and sooner, and to my surprise how many lines from that have found their way into popular parlance. I have the CD of Ralph Fiennes reading it and so Ralph accompanies me on my walks occasionally.

This extract from East Coker is being quoted frequently this week in support of Alice Oswald's stance...

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de GothaAnd the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury.

I've ventured into more Philip Larkin with fiction and letters alongside the poetry and then of course deeply into the life and poetry of Edward Thomas.

Don Paterson's collection Rain is always in my sights (and not just outside the window this week) and of course Don offered me a new perspective on Shakespeare's Sonnets this year with his new commentary.

I have now progressed from Christopher Reid's A Scattering to his Complete Poems. The title poem of A Scattering continues to amble around in my head and I read it often and with Christopher Reid's own thoughts in my mind too... 'What appealed to me...as the mixture of clumsiness and grace in the elephant's behaviour. My grief was clumsy, but I hoped that grace would come of it.'

I expect you've seen the footage: elephantsfinding the bones of one of their own kinddropped by the wayside, picked clean by scavengersand the sun, then untidily left there, decide to do something about it.

But what exactly? They can't of coursereassemble the old elephant magnificence;they can't even make a tidier heap...

...elephants at their abstracted lamentations -may their spirit guide me as I place my own sad thoughts in new, hopeful arrangements.

So now I'm looking for some new poetic directions for 2012... whither next dovegreyreaders??

If any of you feel you could give a home to Ten Poems About Bicycles, or Ten Poems about Puddings, or Six Poems by Christina Rosetti, please tell me which and why in comments, we will choose three people to receive, and I will do what I should have done when they first arrived and post them on ...I get there eventually.

Thursday, December 08, 2011

So there I was idly browsing A History of England in 100 Places - From Stonehenge to the Gherkin by John Julius Norwich, published by John Murray.......whilst also admiring the illustrations by Ed Kluz. The latter, I would venture to suggest, deserves a bigger mention than his name in 6pt on the end flap of the dust jacket, because Ed's lino-cut-like drawings throughout, adding as they do a modern edge to our ancient monuments, give this book that extra eye-catching something.Anyway I came across that illustration above and thought 'I'm sure I know that place...but it can't be, ' until I turned back to discover it was...entry number 30, Launceston Castle. Good heavens, we park our car 'neath its ramparts every Saturday when we go out for a read of the newspapers and coffee in Jericho's, what's that doing in this book.And we have never walked up there..and we still haven't actually, but we will do very soon.

A typical Norman motte-and-bailey affair built on a natural mound and begun by William the Conqueror's half-brother within a year or so of the Conquest with some thirteenth century additions, and apparently the focal point of a bit of a rebellion over the Book of Common Prayer. Not something I wager would exercise the locals too strenuously these days perhaps, but they were a zealous Cornish-speaking crowd back in the 1540s and, making head nor tail of English, were most reluctant to surrender their more intelligible Latin forms of worship. Anyway there was a bit of conflagration down Helston way which resulted in twenty-eight Cornishmen good and true being brought to Launceston Castle for some hanging, followed by a bit of drawing and quartering.

So my thanks to John Julius Norwich for enlightening me about my doorstep with his wonderful doorstop of a book (500 pages), and you'll find the other ninety-nine moments of telling you things you may not know about your own UK doorstep herein. It's a chronological, rather than a geographically ordered, trek of devotion around the famous as well as the lesser-known and more unusual corners of the British Isles, so your SatNav will earn its keep, and written in John Julius Norwich's typically warm and engaging style. Plus you will discover some very useful facts along the way...yes, the Romans did wear underpants, that's right George 1st couldn't string a sentence together, as we suspected Lord Nelson was 'vain,moody and something of an exhibitionist', and contrary to what we would all like to think Thomas Crapper actually only invented the floating ballcock not the rest of the flushing toilet.

Still we wandered on through the streets of Launceston wondering why we had never walked up to the castle before and trying to imagine some drawing and quartering in progress, but only came across the town band out playing carols...and this rather macabre polar bear automaton with the saddest, maddest, panic-stricken countenance and swivelling its head from side to side in very melancholy fashion wondering what on earth was going on....... before slipping into our favoured window seat in Jericho's with the papers, and 'neath the castle ramparts again.How little we know our own doorstep after all this time.

Wednesday, December 07, 2011

If there's one thing I love it's a good ferret around someone else's bookshelves, and I know people love to nose around mine too because when a book-lover comes to visit we might as well give up on conversation until they've taken it all in.

I realise it now, I've sat in other people's homes in the past and been far too polite, so when a copy of Unpacking My Library : Writers and Their Books arrived , it sort of made up for plenty of shelves I might have missed through good manners.

The first thing to note is that this an oblong book, perfectly suited to the plethora of landscape photographs of shelves which I hoped would be inside. I was not disappointed as editor Leah Price let me loose on the shelves of a range of predominantly US authors, perhaps lesser known to me (apart from Philip Pullman) but as this is Yale University Press book that is understandable.

But to honest, itmakes no odds, I'll nose around anyone's shelves and now I feel as if the writers have given me a very personal guided tour around their libraries The introduction makes reference to several quintessentialy English libraries, including the one in the Queen Mary doll's house now at Windsor Castle, with its library of tiny but authentic replicas, and also the library at Chatsworth House, though no mention of mine. This corner currently adorned with a very select and tasteful set of colour changing dove lights from B&Q which I think gives it that much-coveted Griswold Christmas Vacation ambience.Another snippet of information suggesting that the book is far from dead in this digital age is that Ikea has now manufactured twenty-eight million Billy bookcases. They need to make that twenty-eight million and ten because we are about to shelve out another room.

And talk about coveting...

Rebecca Goldstein and Steven Pinker have a ladder...I want one like this.And I quite like their cube matrix storage system for its ease of categorizing.

Jonathan Lethem has a nice chair...Actually Claire Messud and James Wood have a nice chair too.

I expect, like me, Philip Pullman knows just where everything is.and could lay his hand on it straightaway.Each author answers a series of questions about their respective libraries and bookish habits as well as choosing a Top Ten from their shelves. But the shelf contents are easily visible so I have spent hours browsing them. I was interested to read that Philip Pullman would throw his Kindle in the bin the minute the 'Big Crash' happened, but while he has one he revels in the ability to take hundreds of books with him as he travels...I had him down as a non-Kindler for some reason.

But back to reading chairs...

I am currently coveting this one from sofa.com to go next to my BookRoom stove..Which took me on a terribly covetous journey to St Jude's Fabrics and some favoured designers including Angie Lewin, though really I should probably have the chair covered in this... Doveflight in grey by Mark Hearld. and this low chair thing has all become an obsession since Fran sent me this picture of Clive Bell's study at Charleston, and Bookhound has it imprinted on his mind's eye and is scouring the sale rooms accordingly.Do you have a reading chair?

I'm a bit hand to mouth with Slightly Foxed. Sometimes they send me a free copy for which I am always grateful, sometimes they don't, probably because I haven't written about my complimentary copies when everyone else has. But I have been biding my time in order to see exactly how Slightly Foxed might make an impression on me and inform my reading over the year, rather than waxing lyrical just because I have had a free copy.

I've been happily and willingly reeled in by the wily fox before but the thorny problem is that in these cash-strapped times £36 feels like quite a large layout for the annual subscription to what on first appearances seems like a modestly-sized quarterly magazine. I was in like a shot when it first set up, subbed for a year and then went peicemeal, and though ninety-six pages and 'modestly-sized' is to unfairly belie the contents of this vibrant and stimulating literary diamond I wanted to see whether it still had real staying power with me.

I blame two people for yesterday's dash.

Firstly Carol who sent me such a wonderfully enthusiastic account of the Slightly Foxed Literary Day held at the Art Worker's Guild in Queen's Square a few weeks ago. Penelope Lively talking to Sue Gee about their writing lives, Daisy Hay on her book Young Romantics, Maggie Fergusson on Orkney writer George Mackay Brown, Juliet Gardiner on the Blitz, Ysenda Maxtone Graham on her grandmother Jan Struther of Mrs Miniver fame and more, plus this session which sounded wonderful...

Frances Donnelly (who made the cakes) and Jeremy Lewis on Graham Greene. JL was a real raconteur who told lots of funny little stories about the various famous and not so famous Greenes, and probably got the biggest round of applause of the day for his sort of elderly-schoolboy enthusiasm.

In Carol's words 'terrific value at £45 for the day plus tea and cakes' so it's in my diary to look out for the next one too. Not to be missed, and I have had the Slightly Foxed book shop on my list of places to visit when in London for ever too, so that will be next time.

So with Slightly Foxed bleeping away quietly on my radar screen, a determined little glow, I happened to fly across to Will Rycroft's blog yesterday morning where there was a discussion in progress about Austerlitzby W.G.Sebald.

I love Sebald's writing and there's always a danger that I get overly effusive about it all and wrongly come across as 'trying to be an expert' when in fact I am nothing of the sort. But I had read about Sebald and Austerlitz recently and I was sure it was Diana Athill writing in Slightly Foxed and much more of an expert.

So anyway I turned the house upsidedown looking for the right edition with the Diana Athill piece in it (Winter 2010, p61 Uncomfortable Truths) found a really great quote from Diana to assist those in comments at Just William's Luck who were procrastinating over whether to read Sebald or not, or had perhaps retired defeated from their own personal battle of Austerlitz. I wanted to be encouraging because I think perhaps once you 'get' Max Sebald you keep him close to your heart, and so I brought in Diana Athill who I think cracks it gently and enticingly with this..

'It is necessary to make an act of trust - to put yourself in his hands; and this may be a problem for anyone who has not yet learned to trust him by reading his wonderful The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and Vertigo. I doubt whether I would have persisted beyond the first thirty-odd pages of Austerlitz if I hadn't already learned that wherever Sebald led, I must follow him.'

So I left what I hoped was an encouraging rather than a 'who does she think she is' type of comment before settling back to read the rest of the article, and this is for at least the third time, may be even the fourth. By now I'm supposed to have started work (from home) and I'm still idling away the day reading an edition of Slightly Foxed I almost know by heart, when it dawned on me that I absolutely had to have the latest edition yesterday. I was suddenly overcome by the urge to see and hold the thing, browse through it, read a few articles and spot what else was in it to look forward to and what it might prompt me to read. Worse, I couldn't bear the thought that it was out there and not here with me. Pitiful I know, covetousness in its worst manifestation.

The little pulsating thought of this purchase kept me going through a morning of everyone's saddest losses, bereavements, serious illnesses et al until eventually, online work hours (four) done and remembering to change out of my slippers, I hopped in the car, drove into town, parked in the nearest available spot and strode purposefully into the local indie bookshop,

'Have you got the newest edition of Slightly Foxed?' I asked.

The shop owner pointed, I fell upon it, paid, walked back to my car and drove home.

Simples, only twelve miles, but I mean it all smacks of desperation and addiction doesn't it.

Does this happen to anyone else, perhaps about a book and the craving that can't be resisted??

In my defence I am using up all available willpower to lose weight at the moment (18lbs gone, 3lbs to go) and a book coming from Penguin in February Willpower - Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength, which I have been reading, suggests that you may only have sufficient willpower to focus on one project of deprivation at a time. I have now added to that evidence-base.

Anyway I dashed in the door with the spoils, threw a log on the fire, avoided tea and cake and settled down to read Slightly Foxed Winter 2011.

I knew it. I knew I was meant to go and buy this edition...

Louisa M. Alcott, J.L.Carr (A Month in the Country) , Jaroslav Hasek (The Good Soldier Sveck) Winifred Holtby, Dorothy L.Sayers, Paul Scott's Raj Quartet, Dodie Smith, Thackeray, Laura Ingalls Wilder and more, all the choices of authors and contributors various to this quarter's selection of books that deserve to be read and better known. Best so far a wonderful piece about the poet Charles Causley, born and lived all his life in nearby Launceston and to my shame a poet I know so little about and just waiting to be discovered by me.

And finally, the beautifully comic piece by Sarah Crowden on Bizarre Books, and Sarah's alter ego Dame Smut, and how she keeps that shop window we all love to stare at stocked with titles like Scouting for Boys and Indoor Games for Awkward Moments. For anyone who may not know it this is Jarndyce Antiquarian Booksellers in Great Russell Street, opposite the British Museum.

Meanwhile, though I am now firmly reeled in again, I can't decide whether a subscription is the answer or not. It probably is in terms of supporting the publishers financially with what, over the last eight years, has become an invaluable fix addition and resource for booklovers like me and thee, and one it would be a tragedy to lose. But then there's the complete pleasure (I don't get out much) to be gained from that impulse must-have-must-buy-now moment, or happening upon the latest edition unexpectedly in a bookshop. Mind you, I doubt any booklover would turn their nose up at the gift of a Slightly Foxed subscription and you could drop hints with your nearest and dearest accordingly.

And even better, there's a really must-have Slightly Foxed tea/coffee mug...and a bag...and special limited run numbered book editions...and slip cases to keep the quarterlies safely homed... and postcards and things. I'm sorry but if I have been tempted (and I have, one back issue, one bag this time round) it is imperative I share.

My only quibble would be this from the Editors...

So, Christmas is nearly here and we do hope you'll enjoy this winter issue, which comes to you with our very best wishes. Slipped into it you'll find another of our literary crosswords, designed for those inevitable moments during the festive season when you really can't think what else to do, and if you can, you're too exhausted to get up and do it.'

Entries in the hat by January 14th, free subscription to the first one drawn out. Oh brilliant. I love a good crossword me.

Turned every page... shook the thing by the spine ... looked again... no flippin' crossword.

Monday, December 05, 2011

Every so often I go to the What's New This Month shelf and pick out a pile of books, sit down and make a start on them all, just to get an idea of which may be for now, which for another day or which maybe perhaps eventually, and sadly some which may be never.

On this particular evening, after a run of serious reading I was in the mood for something funny.

I think we've discussed this before, that what exactly defines 'funny' may be different for all of us, and 'funny' is sadly not always as well-written as we may like either. It has to be harder to pull off than serious.

Well The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson seemed to suggest 'funny' before I'd even opened it, with a cover design that promised amusing, and with its different Picador binding, a shiny, self-bound cover and no dust jacket, semi-hardback but not quite.

And from the minute I met Family Fang I was won over. Parents Caleb and Camille and children Annie ( Child A) and Buster ( Child B). Caleb and Camille are performance artists who specialise in 'creating a situation to elicit extreme emotional responses in others'. A little sort of flash mob of their own and the children are the reluctant props in the act.

The art embraces daily life situations into which the Family Fang insert an element of surprise on the unknowing public, not unlike the TV series You've Been Framed..or does anyone remember Candid Camera... and despite the fact you can't help but know how damaging it all is for these little emotional wrecks, it is very funny indeed.

'Mr and Mrs Fang called it art. Their children called it mischief. "'You make a mess and then you walk away from it," their daughter Annie, told them. "It's a lot more complicated than that, honey," Mrs Fang said as she handed detailed breakdowns of the event to each member of the family....They were driving to Huntsville, two hours away, because they did not want to be recognised...'

I'm not going to pull any of the situations out of the context of the book because that would be to spoil the impact, but I was chuckling away merrily.

The book moves back and forth, between Annie and Buster's adult lives... Annie, in her parents' eyes, having sold her soul to the devil by becoming a film star, the lowest form of performance art, and Buster a reporter of weird and bizarre events... and their highly dysfunctional childhood mostly spent being highly embarrassed about their parents. Most of us parents fulfill that role unintentionally in our childrens' lives whilst Caleb and Camille take it to cringeworthy new levels.

It is a rare girlfriend of Buster's who puts her finger on the emotional baggage that both he and Annie carry

'...it's like your family trained you to react to the world in a way that is so specific to their art that you don't know how to interact with people in the real world. You act like every conversation is just a build-up to something awful....'

When Annie is unwisely talked into appearing topless in one of her films, and Buster, reporting on a rather whacky gang of amateur weapon-makers is shot in the face by a potato ( don't ask) the pair decide to return to the Fang family fold. Caleb and Camille take them out on a performance for old times' sake where it becomes clear the olds seem to be losing their touch, so when their parents suddenly go missing, Annie and Buster are torn between believing they really have gone missing, or is this all part of a grand performance.

At this point I guess Kevin Wilson could have lost a grip on his material but he really does maintain a balance between the humour and the pathos, as both Annie and Buster reflect on their parents, how they feel about them, whether they have ever been loved or not and what the future may hold if Caleb and Camille don't return. And then as they figure out a way to flush their parents out, if that indeed is what they are supposed to do.

I won't of course reveal the slightest hint about the ending, but to say it surprised me completely... as in feather knocked down with, is an understatement. The denouement subverted just about every expectation I had and I salute Kevin Wilson for doing something quite clever there. Because perhaps this was a way of including me, and my reactions as a reader into a piece of performance art a la Family Fang. I was that surprised onlooker, filmed by them so often in the past, registering shock and disbelief on my face as events unfolded.

So if you are on the lookout for something different and quirky, perhaps add The Family Fang to the list, and I had to laugh because for a family called Fang, surely the most obvious Christmas card to send is the one that Camilla and Caleb do... with the whole family posing wearing false fang-like teeth.

I mean, honestly, how daft is that, surely only the barmiest of families do that sort of thing??Yes, we'll be doing it again this year too.

Friday, December 02, 2011

A copy of The Bees by Carol Ann Duffy to five lucky winners worldwide today and my thanks to Picador for sharing the buzz love.So do a bit of a wiggle and dance along to comments to leave your mark ... in fact do write a little bee poem if you feel so inclined, though sadly it won't hold much sway with the Random Number Generator. However it will give us all a good laugh, and here's a picture of a bumbley one for some inspiration.... don't worry, Carol Ann probably needs help like this too sometimes.

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

In keeping with this week's outdoor theme we're going all ornithological today, and just look at me the socialising party girl, out on another blog tour, and this time I'm with the twitchers and the real tweeters to celebrate the publication of Bird Watching With Your Eyes Closed by Simon Barnes. Honestly, don't anyone say we don't do variety here, and this week I'm in the esteemed company of an ex Conservation Director of the RSPB , an author , a reviewer of natural history books and grrl scientist (no I don't know either) so I feel a bit like the cuckoo in the nest...definitely no slacking today. You might want to have this playing in the background while you read because by the miracles of techno-wizardry you can listen to Simon Barnes and sixty-six birds (not all at the same time) on the podcast here...

Just to establish our credentials, we do love our birds here in the Tamar Valley. We waved off our two annual broods of veranda swallows ages ago...

... and then we get the bird tables out (planks on top of the hedge) and fill the feeders and melt fat and mix it with seeds for the half coconuts, all to welcome back the winter residents and I know a lot of you do likewise.We do plain...and we do show offs...The fifteen wrens that squat in that vacant swallow's nest cause mayhem every time we open the front door to bring in the logs, and a wonderfully eclectic mix of robins, blackbirds and tits various, blue, coal and long tailed, along with chaffinches et al muster each day. We are currently spending more on our bird feeders than we might be on feeding ourselves because we get so much pleasure from just leaning, and staring at them outside the kitchen window... And of course we are still waiting for the barn owls, who circle around every evening, to realise that they hate where they are living now and that this des res is indeed the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and can be theirs for the taking...And you can read how this Pole Box arrived chez dovegrey (with pictures) as part of the Westmoor Barn Owl Scheme in The Barn Owl Trust newsletter here....but put a blindfold on me and I doubt I would know many of our birds from their songs.

Birdwatching With Your Eyes Closed is the sort of book I love because I open it thinking I know so very little and really can I discern one bird call from another, do I know a raven from a jackdaw, would I know my dunnock from my great tit, and am I going to be made to feel a bit stupid for not knowing when really I should. Well the answer is a resounding 'no' to everything because Simon Barnes does that really sensible thing of encouraging his reader rather than excluding them, so within a few pages it has become clear that, if I sat and thought about it carefully I, and most of us, do know more bird song than we realise.

Cuckoo, seagull, owl, wood pigeon, pheasant, buzzard, woodpecker might be my definites, your list would be different but equally populated I expect,(knowing how far flung you all are someone somewhere's bound to have a vulture or a bald eagle or something on theirs) and as I write them out I have that wonderful podcast from Short Books, playing in the background. If you are listening you will already know that Simon Barnes has a very soothing voice, gentle dulcet tones.

In fact to try and learn these I have been listening on the headphones during my walk each day, which seems a bit daft along the deserted lanes of the Tamar Valley where, if I did but listen, I would hear them all for real. Except I don't instinctively know my blackbird from my song thrush, or my robin from my wren...not really or with any accuracy.

So how have I got this far in life without really paying proper attention to birdsong??

Actually I am getting better by the day and by jove do you know, the man's right. This time of year, according to Simon Barnes, the bird I am most likely to hear singing a territorial solo will be the robin, even if I can't see it. So I have listened and heard and with some careful looking spotted the songster...and yes, each time it's a robin.

The book is about much more than birdsong though as Simon Barnes explores our relationship with our bird population, the ecology and how fragile that can become, whilst also exploding many of the preconceptions we may have about some birds. I'm warming to rooks now I know that they mate for life and seem to love each other dearly, so I'm currently focusing on identifying my corvids, which all sounded the same to me until Simon explained otherwise. Crows caw in triplets, rooks usually once and jackdaws, not surprisingly say 'Jack', so now you know.

And it's a book about the art of listening too and about silence and paying attention and not in a preachy way. This is about the pleasure of noticing, and for free, and noticing so much that I know I have been taking for granted.

Thursday, November 24, 2011

I've had a paperback copy for years, bought for me by my mum, so when the Oxford University Press edition of Lark Rise to Candleford complete with ribbon bookmark and original wood-engravings arrived, I had a quick look, stroked it lovingly for a while and put it on the shelf to await its moment. I'm sure plenty of you have read it.

But did anyone get engrossed in the BBC series?

I'll admit I started with great gusto because I think we were getting a dose of Mrs Gaskell's Cranford at about the same time, but sadly my enthusiasm quickly waned. Something seemed to go seriously awry along with some very distracting casting. Anyway for reasons which even I can't explain I picked the book up again a while ago, and had a very interesting read of Phillip Mallet's introduction.

For example I hadn't realised this 'lightly fictionalized memoir' of Flora Thompson's childhood in 1880's Oxfordshire, Lark Rise, was first published in 1939, nor that her son Peter was lost at sea when his ship was torpedoed in 1941. And for the benefit of the Tinker who will want this detail, the ship was the Jedmoor, part of a convoy NW of St Kilda and sunk by a German U boat. (your starter for ten Tinker). By this time Flora Thompson had volume two, Over to Candleford ready, swiftly followed by Candleford Green in 1943, and the compilation volume as we know it today Lark Rise to Candleford appeared in 1945.

So a book that I had somehow imagined to have been a contemporaneous account written in the late nineteenth century, was in fact a product of the Second World War, and perhaps a welcome echo of the traditions and camaraderie of a bygone age for a country whose sovereignity was under threat.

And lawks-a-mussy, there was some ambiguity about whether Lark Rise...

'the spot God made with the left-overs, when He'd finished creating the rest of the earth '...

was an autobiography or fiction, and it then emerged that it was a sort of retrospective compilation of place and experience, not entirely accurate, but one that paid homage to the myth of rural England as a nostalgic homeland and which

'harks back to a time when men and women were happier, and perhaps better.'

Phillip Mallet explores all aspects of the debate in his introduction which was enough to give me some solid background as I dipped into a few chapters, and I'll admit I approached it in the light of these previously unknown factors thinking well this is all a bit of a swizz.

Except that all vanished as I started to read and I found myself surprisingly involved.

Is it the way that Flora Thompson, though writing in the third person and as an adult, has somehow managed to distill the essence of childhood whilst capturing the cultural and social customs of the times??

That all-seeing yet often incomplete vision of the inquisitive young observer overlaid with the day to day life of the community

Each chapter stands alone really, a book that can be dipped into almost at leisure rather than read chronologically, and it was the one entitled The Box that initially fascinated me. I was reminded of all those conversations we had on here last year about the Threads of Feeling exhibition I had visited at the Foundling Museum in London, and us all trying to identify the baby clothes and sort our biggins and our barrows from our mantles, clouts and pilches. The exhibition now has a website of its own...so now you can all visit, don't miss it, the fabrics are such an archival treasure, and freighted with so much emotion.

Flora Thompson's 'box' in question is a small oak chest of clothes, 'a popular institution' containing six of everything that a woman would need on the birth of her baby,

'tiny shirts, swathes, long flannel barrows, nighties and napkins, made, kept in repair, and lent for every confinement by the clergyman's daughter.'

In addition the box contained gifts of tea and sugar and a tin of patent groats for making gruel.

The entire village would know that a birth had taken place (the box never allowed to go until it had) when a young girl from the family would be seen wheeling the heavy box precariously balanced on a perambulator through the watching village.

And then there's Queenie, sitting by her beehives tossing the bead-spangled bobbins hither and thither and lace-making...I mean just imagine it. Having tried lace-making I can't imagine attempting it whilst sitting outside being plagued by bees. This incidentally is not mine, it's some I felt very sorry for and rescued from the market...and nor is this some I made earlier either, instead a recent and very exquisite exhibit at The Devon Guild of Craftsmen...But Queenie was on the lookout for a swarm which would have meant a huge financial loss. And it is the bees Queenie tells of news of her husband's death '...or they'd all've died, poor craturs.'...all bee-keepers tell their bees the news of a death and it's a reference I keep coming across in the oddest places now.

And so it goes on, the daily round in Lark Rise, and so it goes on for me too. More perfect Middlemarch atmosphere (though of course Middlemarch is set considerably earlier in the nineteenth century) and Lark Rise to Candleford a book that has been, and I think will continue to be, a really lovely surprise after all these years.

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Whilst in London, and with a few hours to spare before meeting up with Helen and heading off to her talk at the V&A, I wandered into the British Museum for a mooch.

Really there can be no better place to amble as I discovered on those cold, rather grey wintery London afternoons back in the 1970s when I lived very nearby. Often I would come off duty after an early shift, everyone else would be working a late shift or the nurse's home in Bedford Place would be tip-toe quiet because my room-mate was on night-shift and still asleep, and it was also a bit chilly.

So I'd go to the British Museum for a wander.

In those days it really was, dare I say it, deathly boring to my nineteen-year old eyes and a mind full of the excitement of London life and this new career I was embarking on, but it was nearby and my feet were usually killing me, and it was free, it was quiet and it was warm. Now of course a bustling, user-friendly and inviting place, still free and if it was good enough for George Eliot (who I am discovering often visited daily) then it's good enough for me.

Being a keen Olympian I nipped up to look at the exhibition of the 2012 medals, this being the nearest I am likely to get to seeing one. Some of the ore mined at Salt Lake City, some in Mongolia, tens of thousands of tons of it to make the 4,700 medals, and each one taking about ten hours to make at the Royal Mint in Wales.And then I just had a bit of an aimless, map-less wander and isn't it just amazing what you see.

I looked at these for ages, foot guards from umpteen years BC, and pondered all that careful attention to the toenails and the hinges and wondered when might your average Grecian wear them ...

And then a dazzling treasure trove, the largest quantity of coins ever found in Britain (I think) and I spent a while wondering what it must have been like to be the one to dig this lot up... and I wish I could remember where it had been discovered. It might be the Hoxne Treasure??After a wander around the Grecian urns I just followed the noise because of course the Egyptian Galleries, devoid of the living bar me on those grey 1970's afternoons, now one of the museum's main attractions for school visits. Harrassed teachers were trying to control over-excited children who were supposed to be drawing things but were mostly playing hide and seek around the antiquities.

But there they were, all me old mates...Still a source of endless fascination forty years on.

And as I left the Museum thinking it was really time I read Penelope Fitzgerald's The Golden Child again, of course a glance upwards to the spectacular roof which illuminates even the greyest of days.

Saturday, November 19, 2011

With working days either side my two day whistle-stop trip to London seemed to be over in a flash this week, but it was so good to meet up with Helen Rappaport for her talk on Magnificent Obsessionat the Victoria & Albert Museum.

The talk was predictably excellent so if you find yourself within travelling distance of one of Helen's events over the next few months don't miss it. The audience was spellbound not only by Helen's delivery (BBC are you listening...Fiona Bruce is not the only one who can do this sort of thing) but the brilliant content and a succession of fascinating and beautiful pictures to go with it. I think this is long-suffering daughter Alice who nursed Prince Albert, her father, through his final days and sadly died of diphtheria on the anniversary of his death all those years later.Helen and I then spent the following day in London and I have to say it was a special and memorable moment to go into the National Portrait Gallery with her in order to pay homage to the painting of Mary Seacole. I snatched this shot for you all just before I was in trouble for taking pictures inside the gallery...Suitably chastised we took ourselves off to a seat 'neath the gaze of a bank of portraits of Victorian luminaries, from William Morris and Lesley Stephen to John Stuart Mill, who I like to think would have applauded my rule-bending courage on your behalf. Helen then recounted the story of how she discovered this portrait in the possession of an art dealer, was convinced it was Mary Seacole, bought it and has since ensured that it remains in a national gallery for all to see rather than tucked away in a private collection.

We then couldn't do other than divert to the fabulous cafe in the National Gallery next door, where the temptation of the coffee and walnut cake was all too much to resist, before heading into the exhibition currently in progress back in the Portrait Gallery, The First Actresses, Nell Gwynn to Sarah Siddons. And how excited was I to see that the first portrait was of Hester Booth in her harlequin costume, a woman with very strong links to Port Eliot (Hester's daughter Harriot married into the family) who also have a very similar painting of her. The exhibition wasn't crowded either so a chance to get up close to the pictures and read all the details and talk our way around.

A stroll across London took us down to Hatchards in Piccadilly to witness 'the book' on the shelves, and I have to tell you that to get to this shelf we had to push Andrew Marr out of the way as he plodded through signing about a thousand copies of his latest book.

Anyway we got the picture we wanted.A stroll up to Liberty's in Regent Street so that I could stroke the fabrics and drool over the Ianthe rug and earmark £4000 for one in the Book Room when we win the lottery...and as we said our goodbyes later in the day and headed for respective trains, time for me to reflect on a really special trip and my thanks to Helen for her excellent company.

Friday, November 18, 2011

Having enjoyed a revival of my dormant inner child thanks to the Red House Children's Book Award shortlist, and having then discovered that I love the writing of Patrick Ness, I am now really looking forward to his Chaos Walking Trilogy which has just arrived, The Knife of Never Letting Go, The Ask and the Answer and Monsters of Men.

Has anyone else read these and if so what can I expect... apart from the fact this might take me a while given that the three books run to about 1500 pages (double spaced admittedly)

I also had a serendipitous moment of the long-arm of coincidence-ness last week which led to the arrival of another book.

The Endsleigh Salon theme was the 1970s and they very graciously allowed me to subtract five given its Orwellian1984 connections and take in 1Q84 to talk about, on the basis that Haruki Murakami had rendered me incapable of picking up anything else for weeks. Of course then I was in trouble... only half way through the book and trying to explain what it was about...er..well, there are these two people and these sort of two parallel universes and one of these people has semi-ghost re-written a book by a really strange girl, oh yes and there are two moons in the sky and then the other one of these people, a girl, goes round murdering people. Yes, it's really good. Not sure this will help Murakami sales at all but suffice to say I finished it between Paddington and Taunton, thought about it all the way to Exeter, have Volume Three lined up and ordered a whole box-load more of Murakami because I have finally found a way into his writing with 1Q84.

But I digress. Fortunately everyone else had stuck to the Endsleigh theme and amongst the books was one from one of the Happy Campers, who had heard Tiffany Murray talk about Diamond Star Halo at Port Eliot Festival, read it afterwards and loved it. Halo Llewelyn grows up in a rural recording studio, mixes with the rich and famous rock stars as a child and I was sold on it and made a note. Well I'll go to the foot of our stairs because the very next morning there it is, an e mail from Tiffany Murray, who clearly has extra-sensory-sixth-sense-crystal-ball-perception asking if I would be interested in reading her latest novel Diamond Star Halo.

Some things are obviously destined to be and I said yes with indecent haste.

Now I know there are some purists out there who will find any book that attempts to add to the shrine of Jane Austen's literary output something of a crime, so how fitting that it is P.D.James who has done it. Death Comes to Pemberley and Darcy and Elizabeth have been married for six years, there are sons in the nursery and happiness is complete until Lydia Wickham's chaise comes hurtling down the drive, out she tumbles screaming that her husband has been murdered and we can only wonder whether Adam Dalgliesh is in hot pursuit ready to investigate. I'm really looking forward to this one and on the subject of sleuthing, did I read that the latest theory is that Jane Austen may have died from arsenic poisoning, or did I dream that...

Another new arrival that is most definitely tapping into my inner child, Homework for Grown Ups Quiz Book - fiendishly fun questions to test your old-school knowledge by E.Foley and B.Coates. It actually has the look and feel of one of those school text books that you'd open and be faced with geometry pictures and then start to feel a bit sick whilst hoping you'd got the one that someone had pencilled in the answers. Lord knows how I passed the Eleven Plus.

I shall now test you with some 'simple mental arithmetic' for starters, my klutz subject ... hands on desk, no calculators hiding under the desk lid please... except for Dark Puss who has to put on a blindfold and try and get the answers without even reading the questions :-)

A typist averages 14 words to a line and 30 lines to a page. How many pages will be needed for 38,406 words?

Pencils cost a stationer £1.80 for a packet of 10. How many can she buy for £36.00?

Robert accidentally divides by 8 instead of multiplying by 8 and gets an answer of 564. What should his orginal answer have been?

One lucky contest winner receives 1/4 of his winnings in cash, and is given four more prizes, each worth 1/4 of the balance. If the cash and one of the prizes are worth a combined total of £35,000 what is the total value of his winnings?

a) £70,000b) 75,000c) 80,000d) 140,000

Don't put the answers in comments because we really don't want to give Dark Puss any help, I'll post them later.

Listen, you'll thank me on the day that doctor asks you to count backwards from a hundred subtracting seven each time...

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

I don't know why on earth I have been dragging my heels about settling down to the late Eva Ibbotson's writing.

Not the first idea.

It's not as if I haven't seen her name in lights around the internet and the review pages, and I have diligently acquired the books as I have seen them mentioned, but just never really settled down to read them. I suspect my attention was first drawn in Eva Ibbotson's direction when I read Manja by Anna Gmeyner and realised that Eva was Anna's daughter. Manja remains one of the most powerful and disturbing books from the Persephone list that I have ever read and I have always been grateful to them for bravely bringing such a different book back into print. If you haven't read it and perhaps think of Persephone books as generally warm, comfy hot-water bottle reads, then think on, because Manja could not be more different in the way it tracks the lives of a group of children in Nazi Germany making such stark contrasts with the terror that is going on around them.

'I was eight years old when I came to Britain as a refugee - and was not particularly grateful. Mostly this was because after years and years of being a sheep coming to the manger, or a grazing cow, I had at last landed the part of the Virgin Mary in the nativity play at my convent school in Vienna.

And then ... Hitler....'

So thanks are in order yet again to this year's Red House Children's Book Awards shortlist for another read that might have passed me by. I don't know about all this Orange and Booker stuff any more but I'm definitely going to add the Red House list to my reading every year from now on. Really refreshing reading towards the end of another year of grown-up books, and Eva Ibbotson's final book, One Dog and His Boy, completed a few weeks before her death at the age of eighty-five in October 2010.

Having read a couple from the shortlists that deal with the gritty and challenging subjects of loss and bereavement and terminal illness, I am slightly relieved to see that the Nation's Children still love books like this too because I know I enjoyed them .

I still have my copy bought with 3/6d of my pocket money from the school book club and I was transported right back there to the animal journey apsects with One Dog and His Boy, as young Hal, remarkably resistant to the over-indulgence of his wealthy but emotionally neglectful parents pleads with them, not for the toy department of Hamleys, but a dog. When Hal's dream comes true and young Fleck appears on his birthday let joy be unconfined until it becomes clear that Fleck has only been rented for the weekend from Rent-a-Pet and will have to be returned on Monday.

Add together a timely release of five dogs including Fleck from Rent-a-Pet by a kennel maid, a happy reunion with Hal followed by young Hal's decision to make the journey north to go and live with his grandparents with all the dogs in tow, and of course Eva Ibbotson has all the material for one of those wonderfully gently anarchic, parent-free voyages of discovery. This one lacks nothing, with all the potential for nasty grown-ups to reap their just humiliations and punishments, and for some changes of heart and a bit of forgiveness and redemption where needed all making this book such a joy to read.

Alison Lurie in her fascinating book Don't Tell the Grown-Ups - Subversive Children's Literature, expands wonderfully on all these themes...highlighting the importance for children of the books

'...and whose values may not be overtly of the conventional adult world but which appeal to the imaginative, questioning, rebellious child within all of us, renew our instinctive energy, and act as a force for change.'

Yeeeeeeesssssss. Eva Ibbotson captures all that and more in One Dog and His Boy.

And I must mention the little illustrations by Sharon Rentta which are delightful and enough to make you want to head down to Battersea Dogs Home and claim a 'Tottenham Terrier' of your own. Beautifully atmospheric images of the dogs in all their moods, especially Fleck in his extremes of misery and clutching his bit of cuddly blue flannel ...and happiness...This book is on the Books for Younger Readers shortlist and it is the children who will vote... if you know any could you sort of twist their arms a bit and say vote for this one??

No, no I didn't mean that, just shut them in a cupboard or something until they agree.

This is a book that would bring pleasure to all ages, so highly recommended for a child near you, but just make sure you read it yourself first and benefit from the wonderfully, warm feel-good inner glow this book will give you.

Final words to Alison Lurie...

'Too often we leave the tribal culture of childhood ...behind, we lose contact with instinctive joy in self-expression: with the creative imagination, spontaneous emotion, and the ability to see the world as full of wonders. Staying in touch with children's literature and folklore as an adult is not only a means of understanding what children are thinking and feeling; it is a way of understanding and renewing our own childhood.'

No I've changed my mind, final words to Eva Ibbotson and Hal...

'For a few moments Hal, sitting opposite, just let her cry. Then something horrible happened. The anger he felt with his parents began to get weaker...and weaker still. He missed it badly, this rage which had kep him going on his adventure. But there was nothing to be done about it; it was gone. His mother had done a wicked thing; she was foolish and misguided - but she was his mother.

Monday, November 14, 2011

You might have noticed, under Looking... over on this sidebar>>>>> that some really very fine books indeed have arrived. I've called it Looking... when in fact they all have a great deal of reading in them, along with the requisite sumptuous pictures, and so I will be writing about quite a few over the next few weeks.

The first one I picked propped up was The Story of Swimming by Susie Parr.

The hidden bounty in books like this is the fact that I didn't have the first clue about the story of swimming, nor that I might even want to know, but when Susie wrote to me and mentioned that she had been a crocheting dovegreyreader tent visitor at Port Eliot, and would I be interested in seeing a copy of her book on swimming, I very politely said yes please, expecting perhaps a little handbook on the history of the swimming gala or something.

Jim the Postie may now have a hernia but this gorgeous great big book arrived, and I have spent many happy evenings reading it...

I'm not a brilliant swimmer, this I must admit. I'm self-taught really, so some very flaky keep-the-hair-dry breaststroke, more suited to having a conversation with someone swimming alongside me than any aspirations to be Anita Lonsborough (Rome 1960, my first remembered Olympic Games). I can manage a passable backstroke but I really hate not being able to see where I'm going, and only a very rubbish four strokes at front crawl before I splutter and panic because I have forgotten to breath. I've been too busy worrying about what my arms and legs aren't doing properly, and then I feel as if I'm drowning, and as for butterfly, well let's not go there. About diving, hmm....well, it always feels as if I am in perfect alignment whilst the look on everyone's face when I surface seems to say 'That must have hurt.'

Susie Parr far braver than I, a devotee of outdoor swimming, the term 'wild swimming' often used, and one coined by Roger Deakin in his book Waterlog, and wild swimming in the River Lynher now a regular feature of Port Eliot Festival. This all involves being really keen to plunge into the nearest lake/loch/dock/harbour/ocean, whilst I'd be stuck on the side wondering about the raw sewage and the E Coli count per cc of water.

Not Susie, and it is her own intrepid swimming life (and presumably a tried and tested immune system) that mingles perfectly with the social and cultural history of swimming, from the Romans to the present day, alongside the pictures many of which have been taken by Susie's husband photographer Martin Parr...

'During the lake season (May to September) I fall into the grip of a powerful addiction. I have to get to the lake every day, no matter what the weather. If I cannot go, because of work or visitors, I become crochety, edgy, ill at ease...'

I have a nursing colleague who is an outdoor swimmer, except this very day she is en route to Africa for a two week nursing project in Kenya where I have no doubt she will find some swimming. She somehow manages to bury her extensive knowledge of pathogens and the risk of septicaemia via an innocent looking cut in order to regularly traverse Plymouth Sound or Roadford Reservoir in aid of charity, and I just pay up and offer words of encouragement and gaze on with incredulity.

So why don't I want to do that??

It's not as if I wasn't showing potential at an early age after all...

Somewhere along the way I must have wimped out big time because swimming was most definitely encouraged in us as children and we loved it.

Remember the Lido? Susie has plenty on the Lido and this is one of the multitude of very revealing aspects in The Story of Swimming ...the fascinating detail surrounding the many different and influencing factors on the practice of swimming; the wars, poverty and class, legislation, transport, the economy, and changing concepts of health, education, beauty and fashion, politics, feminism and sexual liberation.

And then there are the literary swimmers from Wordsworth to Iris Murdoch and let's not forget Rupert Brooke's skinny dip with Virginia Woolf at Byron's Pool near Grantchester. Suzie swims there too... we'd call it a bandit run (the Kayaker paddled many of these slightly out-of-bounds places) ignoring all the Private/ Do Not Bathe signs and exercising a sort of Right to Swim. And Susie definitely risks a plethora of water-borne diseases in a pool that is now a very far cry from the cool, inviting place it must have been when Rupert and Ginny first dived in there, on the eve of the Great War. Fighting with a scum of plastic bags and other unmentionable detritus plus a great deal of mud, Susie emerges feeling her furtive swim in a place that should be 'glorious', has instead been 'rushed, fearful and unpleasant.'

Lidos were about the democratisation of a sport and form of exercise that had become a little elitist in the 1930s, initially challenging the expensive changing facilities on the beaches. Easy to forget the sensitivities, and the fact that rummaging your cozzie on under a towel was absolutely not the done thing. I had no idea that 'mackintosh bathing' even existed, let alone that many local authorities banned the practice of travelling from your guest house to the beach with your bathers on underneath your mac to avoid the expense of hiring a beach hut.

Lidos now fast disappearing, but we'd be awake all night at the thought of the next day's promised trip to Tooting Bec Lido. Speechless with excitement as we sat on the bus from Mitcham and all to swim in a freezing cold pool with the multitudes whilst fighting for about a cubic foot of water each. Now I discover it is one of the largest open-air pools in existence, so you can just imagine how many of us crammed in there back in the early 1960s, and why we had to wait hours for a free changing cubicle. And we were robust and didn't catch things either, now every time I swim in a pool I have a sore throat within days... rubbish and unchallenged 21st century immune system obviously.

Frankly I blame children and the wetsuit.

Children because they would insist on spending hours and hours in the sea so we would have to do the same, hence the wetsuits, and the consequent reluctance for cold water ever thereafter. Susie would be having none of that. The whole point seems to be the envigorating cold water on your skin, pulling clothes back onto a half-dried body afterwards and sitting huddled up with a thermos... and I'm almost tempted to go and have a quick dip in the Tamar right this minute.

Only 'almost'... there's wild and then there's crazy. It was all looking a bit swift under Horsebridge this weekend, I'd be out in Plymouth Sound before I knew it..So a really lovely book and my thanks to Susie Parr for at least making me think about my own swimming history whilst pretending that I might go 'wild-swimming'. I have spent many worthwhile evenings reading and browsing this book, and with much pleasure. The Story of Swimming is published by Dewi Lewis media, a company of whom I knew little but now know a great deal more, and what an eclectic and unusual list of books they produce.

Wednesday, November 09, 2011

11.11.11 on Friday, and the day that this year seems to hold even greater significance with those numbers, and after our recent Edward Thomas reading, making it also the perfect moment to say the Christmas word a bit early I know, but to show you Carol Ann Duffy's seasonal offering.

And it is quietly wonder-ful.The Christmas Truce, and most of you will know what follows.

Christmas Eve in the trenches of France,the guns were quiet.The dead lay still in No Man's Land -Freddie, Franz, Friedrich, Frank...The moon, like a medal, hung in the clear, cold sky.

The Poet Laureate's account of the moment that 'peace found a place in No Man's Land' in World War One. The firing stopped, the carols began and the men played football.

The verse is measured and so so clever, all that we have come to expect from Carol Ann Duffy, and this little book, measuring just five inches square, beautifully illustrated by David Roberts. A must-have to add to the Carol Ann Duffy Christmas Collection.

So Christmas dawned, wrapped in mist,to open itselfand offer the day like a gift...

Tuesday, November 08, 2011

I'm hoping everyone is braced and ready for wall-to-wall Dickens centenary celebrations in 2012. I'm preparing in advance but I'm also hoping for some great books and some good media coverage through next year.

Years ago I bought a nice hardback edition of Claire Tomalin's biography Katherine Mansfield - A Secret Life from a second-hand bookshop. To my delight, tucked inside the book was a hand-written card from Claire Tomalin dated 1991 and sent to the previous owner of the book who had obviously done what I said I was going to start doing and had written to the author. I seized upon this little token as if it were my own, as if I had somehow inherited the goodwill in Claire Tomalin's really lovely reply...

'Thank you for your lovely letter, quite undeserved but so nice of you. I went abroad for three weeks, hence my delay in answering...'

And somehow I've always felt an affinity with Claire Tomalin ever since. I moved heaven and earth to hear her talk about Thomas Hardy The Time-Torn Man when she came to Plymouth University a few years ago and so it has been a seamless endeavour to move straight onto her new biography Charles Dickens - A Life in the wake of my recent read of Helen Rappaport's Magnificent Obsession. I feel so bathed in the nineteenth century I now can't wait to start on our read of Middlemarch which I think we will launch on November 22nd, George Eliot aka Mary Ann Evans 192nd birthday (better check the maths someone... 1819)

The first point to make is that as long as books remain the thing of beauty that Charles Dickens - A Life is, then the Kindle will always be a handy Fisher-Price-like reading device for travel purposes (and I would be lost without mine) but never a complete replacement for the real book-lover, the book as object will remain supreme. A printed hardcover with a half slip band dust jacket in fetching shades of sepia and eau de nil combined with superior weight and quality paper make this volume a real joy to hold and to read, which with a £30 price tag is a good thing. Whilst book prices have steadily increased I haven't always seen the paper quality improve accordingly, there will be no foxing of this book in years to come you can be sure of that.I am not as big a fan of Charles Dickens' novels as I would like to be so this needs to be interesting. I have a few firm favourites and usually because I have been made to read them for study and ended up admiring them (Our Mutual Friend, Great Expectations, Dombey ....) but so many of the books I pick up under my own steam, and then start and stop and start and give up on, so it is quite refreshing to read a very honest appraisal of each one, as Claire Tomalin weaves her narrative of Dickens's life around the novels as they happen. Perhaps a sign of the best biographies is neither hint of craven idolatory nor out and out dislike, and thus far Claire Tomalin achieves a disinterested and very balanced critical approach to the life of a man who perhaps undoubtedly remains the greatest novelist in the English language.

The book reads as a novel and I think I can promise that if you settle down to read it you will be drawn into the life of Charles Dickens in the most intimate and endearing way. But with it came for me a real resurgence of enthusiasm to give it another go, to pick up yet another Dickens' novel over yet another Christmas and promise myself a read. I have decided to plump for the one that Claire Tomalin might raise above the rest in her estimation and I am wondering which it might be as each comes under her meticulous scrutiny. David Copperfield seems to be winning so far, but it is only 1850 and some lesser know works are also coming to light which I should like to explore too.

And not only the novels, but the life and with it a real appreciation of the bench mark that Dickens set himself and the pressure incurred by having to write for serialisation. Week in week out he had a deadline to meet, a story to concoct, imagination to find, but alongside it rest all his flaws, and I am wondering quite how I will emerge from the traumas ahead.

Poor Catherine, 'pregnant again' seems to be a recurring chorus, Nelly Ternan is about to enter stage left and I can hardly bear it, because despite knowing the general gist of what is to come, I decided to start the book with an open mind. Thus far I have warmed to this manically busy, clever, imaginative man with a philanthropic heart beating in there somewhere, but alongside this book another little Dickens volume has arrived... Dickens' Women by Miriam Margolyes and Sonia Fraser, and published by Hesperus.

This is a transcript of Miriam Margolyes's one woman show of the title's name, and reading her introduction I am getting a sense of the strength of opinion that abounds ...letters from Dickens about Catherine described as ' a tissue of self-serving lies,' whilst Miriam Margolyes states quite baldly and assertively 'I cannot forgive him,' damning Dickens as the abused turned abuser. Valid but subjective opinions, and so I am intrigued to see how Claire Tomalin walks this particular biographer's tightrope.

I'm wondering what you all think about Dickens and his treatment of his wife... and I wonder how I'm going to feel?? Will I forgive him in the grander scheme of things ... I can't wait to find out, and of course I will report back.

Monday, November 07, 2011

Did I say I couldn't read anything else fictional until I had finished 1Q84?

Well I didn't mean it because a book arrived and I changed my mind, and can I just quickly apologise for more death... what with Jamie's sister Rose and Prince Albert I know I've put you through rather a lot lately, if only writers wouldn't keep writing about it.

I think we may have been amongst the earliest subscribers to Red House here chezdovegrey when they set up some thirty years ago, and I clearly remember the doors that they opened for us, and for starting off our reading as a family, and after all what a great way to spend the Child Benefit. Three small children and we still have the stack of books we bought, many becoming the stuff of family legend...I Want to See the Moon, On Friday Something Funny Happened... and all the wonderful Lucy and Tom series by Shirley Hughes. Those small children might now be thirty, twenty-eight and twenty-six but we still get Lucy and Tom's Christmas out every December, it's part of the tradition ... and another Shirley Hughes favourite of ours Dogger, and then there were the Ahlbergs giving us Each Peach Pear Plum, Peepo and The Jolly Postman. And what about The Tiger Who Came for Tea and The Hungry Caterpillar and Peace at Last, all new then but timeless classics now. The stack of books now suitably dog-eared but precious and much-loved for the memories they hold, even perhaps the sort of thing I would walk past in a charity shop or a jumble sale without a cursory glance, condemning as far too scruffy... I shall think on that next time.

So the e mail came as a lovely reminder that Red House is still there and has gone from strength to strength, now running its own awards for books shortlisted and voted for by children, and the winners will be announced in February. I was very grateful to Red House who then kindly offered to send me any other books from the shortlist. I've started with the Older Children's category, but I've enjoyed this reading so much I think I might make my way through them all...it's all a bit refreshing after the Booker.

The one thing that strikes me is how little the realities of death seemed to crop up in the books I read as a child. Perhaps the 1950s was still too near to the war for comfort and children were being shielded from any more grief after so many years of it... perhaps I just missed the books, and you are probably all going to come up with plenty of titles now. But interesting that the two I have read off the Red House shortlist so far deal with death head on.

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness, from an original idea by Siobhan Dowd and published by Walker Books, with fabulously atmospheric illustrations by Jim Kay, is another brilliant read so deserving of a place on any shortlist.

Philip Pullman calls it..

'Compelling...powerful and impressive.'

Meg Rossoff thinks it is...

'Exceptional...This is storytelling as it should be - harrowing, lyrical and transcendent.'

I'd add in astonishing, amazing and what a wonderful collaboration Patrick Ness has created with the late Siobhan Dowd;a writer who had left the baton charged with characters, a premise and a beginning for this book before her untimely death from breast cancer in 2007, and which Patrick Ness has picked up and run over the finishing line in superb style... in Patrick's own words 'Go. Run with it. Make trouble.'

I have only read one of Siobhan Dowd's books, Bog Child and always meant to read the others, now I certainly will, but I will also seek out Patrick Ness too. By his own admission he had never met Siobhan and nor could he contemplate mimicking her voice, but he did let the idea grow and develop..

'Siobhan's ideas were suggesting new ones to me, and I began to feel that itch that every writer longs for: the itch to start getting words down, the itch to tell a story.'

That story is the life of thirteen-year old Conor, mostly lived within a nightmare because his mum is dying of cancer. We know that, she knows that, all Conor's friends and teachers know that, and deep down Conor knows that, but it will take some extraordinary encounters with a monster who appears in the shape of a gnarled old yew tree to help Conor come to a trusting acceptance of what is happening and to understand why he has to let his mum go.The illustrations are monochrome throughout, moody and giving real credence to Conor's inner sense of chaos at being out of control of events and his life, and the significance of the yew won't be lost on those with some knowledge of chemotherapy. Several of the drugs used in the treatment of breast cancer have been developed from yew clippings, but the whole sheebang has put Conor into territory he never asked to be in and, like little Jamie in My Sister Lives on the Mantlepiece, he is a complete mess inside. Set apart from his friends and knowing something they may not... that really bad things can happen, Conor has to cope with the cruelty of children too. It's hard to imagine really isn't it... children being bullied when they are in such fraught emotional turmoil, but it is not uncommon, and often a reflection of all children having to learn coping skills in new situations like this. There is no pre-learned behaviour, it all has to be learnt anew and the road is rarely straightforward.

Likewise the all-consuming grief of an adult, in this case Conor's grandmother, which may eclipse that of a child, is incredibly well portrayed.

Conor is at an interesting age too. Whilst Annabel Pitcher's Jamie, at ten, might not quite have known the questions to ask, Conor at thirteen knows exactly what to ask but just can't bring himself to put it into words... how will he manage without his mum... where will he live... how will life carry on....what will happen...

It's at least a ten hankie read and by the final page I had tears in my eyes that just wouldn't stay there, but the most invigorating part of all this is that it is children, not adults, who have chosen this book for the Red House shortlist. A book that is unafraid to embrace, confront and challenge head on the fact that loss happens, and the more any child can learn how to cope with it in childhood... to learn that to love is to grieve when that loss happens, perhaps the better and more useful the coping strategies they take into adult life with them. And you would hope most children learn this through hamster and goldfish funerals rather than as Conor had to, but it would seem 21st century children are unafraid to read books like this, and clearly value them when they have.

And last week won the Galaxy Awards ~ Children's Book of the Year, which means it is now in with a shot at Galaxy Book of the Year, it's already had my vote even though Claire Tomalin is racing up on the rails. I'd love A Monster Calls to get the recognition it deserves, both for Patrick Ness but also, I feel sure he would agree, for Siobhan Dowd....and more generally for the fantastic quality of children's literature out there.

But I have a feeling that it is the voice of the children that matters here, and the Red House shortlisting that may be the most significant.

Saturday, November 05, 2011

I don't own an Orla Kiely radio, just the plain wooden version, though if anyone wants me to test run one I'll try my hardest, but I may often have Radio 3 tinkling along at very low volume until something very modern or experimental comes on, or worse opera (which, with apologies to the buffs does sadly have the power to set my philistine teeth on edge, akin to fingernails down blackboards). But it was the complimentary CD of Janacek's Sinfionetta which came with my copy of 1Q84, the new Haruki Murakami novel, that has really focused my attention on the background trilling again.

Incidentally, if you are swithering over 1Q84 but fancy something so very completely different, swither no more, get it on the Christmas list. I am having a fairly unique reading experience with it, and had to download it onto my Kindle as well just so that I could carry on reading whilst in London recently. I can pick it up and be immersed in an instant and anywhere, so the Book Room Dowagers and I are now nicely into Volume 2 and this is quite unlike anything else I've read in a very long time. But 1Q84 renders me incapable of picking up any other fiction at the moment, and I foresee this might have to be the case until I have finished it, which doesn't bode well for next week's Endsleigh Salon remit of the 1970s. I'm hoping I can swing this through by just subtracting five years and plugging the 1984 connection.

And thank you to Erika who very kindly posted me an interview by Sam Anderson with Haruki Murakami from The New York Times Magazine. I hope Haruki knows that I am repaying his statement...

'Concentration is one of the happiest things in my life. If you cannot concentrate, you are not so happy...'

with a vast amount of happy concentration of my own. Considering the book 'held Murakami prisoner for three years' it seems the least I can do. According to Sam Anderson who spent several days in Tokyo with him, this is a writer who has produced,

'three decades of addictive weirdness that falls into an oddly fascinating hole between genres and cultures, a hole that no writer has ever explored before, or at least nowhere this deep...he has produced his longest, most serious book yet'

This is Murakami so expect some explicit content, and if that offends you dreadfully then you might be put off, if you can just accept that it's life and for the way it blends in seamlessly with the whole then proceed. It is the intriguing plot of the book that is taking me into this hypnotic and mesmerising world to the extent that I don't really want to go anywhere else 'made-up' until I emerge blinking into the light again. As to what it's about...eek, well parallel worlds, and normal but at the same time unusual happenings, and two lives glancing off each other with clever connections to try and spot, and worlds which I assume are about to collide, though predicting Murakami probably about as reliable as second-guessing what will win the Booker prize.

So I have a pile of non-fiction on the go when I need a rest from 1Q84, as you'll see over here >>>> and an incredible book on my Kindle, my thanks to Kevin for suggesting The Memory Chalet by Tony Judt at about 11pm one evening, and which I had downloaded and was reading within minutes, and all of which is creating a really vibrant and unusual reading balance for me.

Anyway, where were we...yes, music.

So I have been playing the Janacek and loving it but after about a hundred pages of 1Q84 I was almost subliminally note perfect and needed a change, and having worked my way through quite a few failures it is Bach who now wins the day. Most specifically the Cello Suites which I have on a double CD and played by the inestimable Pablo Casals. Despite its complexities for the musician, and I feel sure Pablo was nurgling his bow to shreds, there is something hauntingly simple and undistracting about the music to my amateur ear, it's like a bass note to my reading and so far I've done two hundred pages-worth and not tired of it. I've dragged a bit more Bach out, usual suspects, Brandenburgs, Goldbergs, a compilation of keyboard favourites and that seems to be the sum total of my Bach collection.

That's a pretty poor show so I'd love some more Bach recommends, and even some more cello recommends beyond Jacqueline Du Pre doing Elgar...oh yes and I've got some YoYo Ma somewhere. But if you listen while you read I'd love to know what you have trilling away in the background... or are you a silence is golden person??

Oh yes, and one more thing, have a safe and happy Guy Fawkes night everyone, the Book Room Dowagers are used to loud bangs, living as we do in the midst of a shooting estate, so I doubt they will be phased, too busy fighting the War of the Vacant Cushion as usual.

Thursday, November 03, 2011

'The Times was confident: 'we have on the throne a Sovereign whose nerves have been braced rather than paralysed by the chill of adversity'. But the newspapermen did not know the Queen as Lady Lyttelton did. Albert's death was, she had no doubt, a ' heart wound' that had torn her world apart.'

I have been unashamedly looking forward to Magnificent Obsession (published today) having followed Helen Rappaport's Facebook updates as she wrote the book... reading of her disappointments when travelling miles to a dusty archive full of anticipation only to find letters which yielded little.. or the excitement when something unexpected gave up its long-held secrets. The trials and tribulations of a writer's life coupled with the certainty that I always enjoy Helen's writing style, books grounded in meticulously accredited scholarly research but all presented in an accessible and informative way; the same style that instantly drew me into No Place for Ladies, Ekaterinburgand Beautiful For Ever.

So I settled into post-London recovery mode...The book opens with a scene that may well enter my pantheon of Extracts to Read Every Christmas, as Helen describes Christmas 1860 for Victoria, Albert and their children. It creates a wonderful and cleverly contrasting setting for what it is to follow as the Royal family settle down to their traditional Christmas holiday at Windsor Castle, and the coldest for some fifty years. The ice on the Serpentine is thirteen inches thick and on December 20th the snow started to fall. Windsor is decorated to the hilt with countless Christmas trees whilst the 360lb baron of beef along with fifty turkeys are being roasted in the kitchens. By now Victoria and Albert have been married over twenty years and have nine children ranging in age from three to twenty and the atmosphere is one of spirited happiness as the corridors of Windsor echo to the noise of playful children interspersed with outings for sledging and skating...

And so the scene is set for the dawn of 1861 and Victoria little knew of the annus horribilis that was to follow as she noted in her diary...

'Dearest Albert and I took leave of the old year and wished each other the joy of the new...'

A great deal of fascinating, and to me unknown, detail is revealed as the burdens upon Albert become more apparent. His responsibilities as Prince Consort have become increasingly onerous as he assumes a greater role in the running of the country, whilst Victoria has spent much of the last twenty years mired in pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood; a role which, by her own admission she enjoyed much less than I had realised. Health issues prevail for Albert and with little sympathy from his wife who dismissed many of his problems as being of the 'man flu' variety...and the really-if-men-had-to-give-birth-where-would-we-be genre. So poor Albert, suffering with increasingly worrying gastro-intestinal problems weakens before our eyes, yet largely unnoticed by his devoted wife and eventually the seriousness hidden from her by her closest family and advisors. Albert is on his death bed before the panic sets in and Victoria, still in denial, is prepared for the worst.

Gathering momentum alongside has been Victoria's own grief reaction at the death of her mother, the first such serious loss she has suffered in her life, and as a portent of things to come a clear indicator that the Queen's emotional coping strategies are limited and there may be trouble ahead. Even the excesses (as we may now view them) of 19th century mourning practices cannot contain Victoria's emotions, whilst the evidence of sanctification of the deceased holds worrying predictors. If Victoria is this distraught over the mother she steadfastly maligned then how on earth will she react to the death of the man she loves with all her heart. It is only a stern rebuke from Albert that pulls the Queen to her senses, but when the Prince Consort's time comes there will be no one to do likewise, and the Queen's grief will know no bounds.

Whilst I was aware of the generalities, I had little idea of the fine detail of Victoria's mourning, and as Helen Rappaport burrowed down into the diaries and letters in order to add substance to it all I slowly developed a fascinating picture of an emotionally labile woman, seemingly selfish and woefully oblivious to the needs and feelings of those around her, as any resilience she may have is severely tested to its limits. Helen Rappaport's account steers a steady course through both the personal and the political as the Queen's increasingly alarming retreat from public life leaves the country wide open to talk of revolution and republicanism. Interestingly it is illness that twice saves the Monarchy, firstly when a seemingly hale and hearty Victoria, whose fragility is constantly given credence and fiercely protected by her personal physician William Jenner, does fall prey to a serious illness. This included the miserable spectre of an excruciatingly painful abscess some six inches in diameter under her arm which Lister is called in to lance and drain ... unimaginable. The wayward and troublesome Prince of Wales's near brush with death during a bout of typhoid is all sufficient to arouse public sympathies further, conveniently bringing the populace neatly back on side.

What emerged for me was the pitiful vision of a very lonely, socially detached, unreachable woman, blind to the state of her nation and its people... present-day theraputic parlance might deem Victoria 'psychologically unavailable'. No one can physically touch Royalty... protocol dictates that you can't go and give them a hug (remember the scandal when the Australian premiere may have 'touched' the Royal back?) Royalty are thus effectively cut off from the emotional support that many of us may rely on in times of grief, sometimes the kindness of strangers, whilst Victoria, remote and bereft of that physical contact with others, and especially with Albert, had only the conversations with her grieving family and her courtiers to sustain her. And despite their best and strenuous efforts for many years, especially those of daughter Vicky in her letters, few seemed to came close to offering the comfort that might penetrate Victoria's wall of sadness and make any difference. Nowadays I'd want to give Victoria the Cruse helpline number for a start ...send her along to Kate Boydell's Merry Widow website... make sure she knew about The Way Foundation, whilst all Victoria can do is retreat alone to her beloved Balmoral wearing her widow's weeds and planning yet another national memorial in her dearest Albert's name.

Further latter-day theories could also usefully be employed, especially that of 'secondary gain' where the perpetuation of symptoms can become, for the sufferer, a conscious or sub-conscious means of avoidance. Victoria seemed bereft of confidence and terrified of public exposure in the absence of Albert which, for all that their love seemed deeply genuine, gave me serious pause for thought about the dependency and control he may have exerted over her during their marriage. His death certainly left her seriously disempowered and it became perhaps easier for Victoria to unwittingly sustain her grief as an excuse rather than have to face up to the rigours of her public duties as a monarch, issues which Helen Rappaport explores to the full ...and of course a stance increasingly difficult for Victoria to sustain credibly when Scottish ghillie John Brown comes into her life, bringing with him his down-to-earth no-nonsense philosophies and not a little joy and mirth at his Balmoral hoe-downs.

Utimately good things, if they can be called that, did emerge as Victoria's sensibilities became so carefully attuned to the impact of loss and bereavement, it became her specialist subject and to the point where, with mounting personal bereavements as the years went by, 'her sacred monopoly on grief transcended all criticism'. The death of daughter Princess Alice on the same day as her father some seventeen years later, sealing the deal. Always the first to sympathise with others in times of loss, and something of an expert on the etiquette of mourning practice, yet from somewhere, through it all Victoria did ultimately find the courage and steely determination to endure.

Helen has added an appendix that really did interest me. As I read the book it was hard not to speculate about the possible differential diagnoses for Albert's final illness. Long thought to be typhoid though with very little investigation and no post-mortem results this was questionable, and Helen has extracted some compelling evidence, along with symptoms of an ongoing and chronic gastro-intestinal condition, that may now suggest a possible diagnosis of Crohn's Disease.

So a remarkable book. A brilliant read, great illustrations including one of Albert on his deathbed, and now I really am looking forward to hearing Helen Rappaport's November 15th talk on Magnificent Obsession at the V&A more than ever.

Tuesday, November 01, 2011

So the day we had all been looking forward to, and Team Edward Thomas meet together in London for the first time and head to Faber for a visit to the Faber archive followed by afternoon tea with Matthew Hollis, author of the book we have been reading and sharing with you Now All Roads lead to France.

Now when I suggested that we all met up at the British Museum courtyard cafe, because whenever I go there it's always deserted, I really should have taken Half Term into account. It was heaving and though four of us miraculously managed to find each other, none of us we then realised had actually laid eyes on Nancy and Bill before. Nancy and Bill had arranged their vacation especially to be in London for this visit so I felt the onus was on me to find them and therefore spent some time circuiting the concourse looking for people who might seem American and look as if they might be called Nancy and Bill, unsurprisingly to no avail.

Nancy and Bill meanwhile astutely spotting the flaws in my plan had had the sense to go direct to Faber HQ and were waiting for us there when we arrived.

With some time to spare beforehand the four of us headed across to Boswell Street off Queen's Square just to see the original location of The Poetry Bookshop. Hopes were high that it might be this building which seemed nicely poetic in appearance...Though later in the day we were sadly disabused of this fantasy, the building was actually next door, long-demolished and now replaced by a block of flats

After a fascinating visit to the Faber archive, and our thanks to archivist Robert Brown for talking with us (and for future reference L>R Bill, Robert, Carol, Fran, Hilary, Moiself, and Nancy seated...)

We were whisked off to the Covent Garden Hotel where I was momentarily diverted by the curtains because they were real proper tapestry..... before we settled down to tea and a lovely talk with Matthew Hollis. In fact a celebratory tea because just the night before Matthew had won the First Biography award for 'our' book.It was good to put our questions to Matthew direct and to share our thoughts about Edward Thomas, the man who had emerged from this book as well as Edward's long-suffering wife Helen, to talk about Edward Thomas's fame achieved in death and what may he have yet achieved in life had the trenches not claimed him and also the legacy of the poetry and which poems felt special for us. And all whilst eating our way through what can only be described as a very divine tea..Our sincere thanks to Faber, to Gemma and to Matthew for such a wonderful afternoon,and my personal thanks to Team Edward Thomas for their participation and for embracing this reading project with such enthusiasm. Matthew will be back here with some written answers to our questions soon but cited As the Team's Head Brass as one of his favourite poems and I think we would all agreed with him on that...

As the team's head brass flashed out on the turn The lovers disappeared into the wood. I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm That strewed an angle of the fallow, and Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square Of charlock. Every time the horses turned Instead of treading me down, the ploughman leaned Upon the handles to say or ask a word, About the weather, next about the war. Scraping the share he faced towards the wood, And screwed along the furrow till the brass flashed Once more. The blizzard felled the elm whose crest I sat in, by a woodpecker's round hole, The ploughman said. 'When will they take it away?' 'When the war's over.' So the talk began - One minute and an interval of ten, A minute more and the same interval. 'Have you been out?' 'No.' 'And don't want to, perhaps?''If I could only come back again, I should. I could spare an arm. I shouldn't want to lose A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so, I should want nothing more....Have many gone From here?' 'Yes.' 'Many lost?' 'Yes, a good few. Only two teams work on the farm this year. One of my mates is dead. The second day In France they killed him. It was back in March, The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.' 'And I should not have sat here. Everything Would have been different. For it would have been Another world.' 'Ay, and a better, though If we could see all all might seem good.' Then The lovers came out of the wood again: The horses started and for the last time I watched the clods crumble and topple over After the ploughshare and the stumbling team.

Monday, October 31, 2011

I frequently get invitations from publishers to be part of something known as a blog tour. This is a chain of posts around a selection of blogs promoting a new book, or asking the author questions. I'm not sure I've often said 'yes' before either, because often the schedule is a bit tight for me to read the book and prepare for it, or I might just not be in the mood to have to read a book to order.

Today I have made an exception and of course this is nothing to do with the fact that David Tennant reads the audio version of a young adult book My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece by Annabel Pitcher.

Or that Orion, the publishers asked if I would be interested in having a short audio excerpt from that reading included in today's post in celebration of the paperback edition now being published under their new young adult / crossover imprint Indigo.

No that's nothing to do with it what-so-ever...

Right, having ascertained that I might actually stoop to new and previously unplumbed depths in order to hear David Tennant's voice on here legitimately, I then realised that, in order for the planets to align, first off I'd actually need to be interested in the book, secondly a copy would need to arrive, thirdly I'd need to make time to read it sharpish and most importantly I'd have to enjoy it a lot.

In fact the minute I read the blurb I knew I had to read the book, David Tennant or no David, who incidentally loved the book so much 'he had to do the audio.'

Ten year old Jamie hasn't cried since it happened. He knows he should have - Jasmine cried, Mum cried, Dad still cries. Roger didn't, but then he is just a cat and didn't know Rose that well really. Everyone kept saying it would get better with time, but that's just one of those lies that grown-ups tell in awkward situations. Five years on, it's worse than ever...'

Well I've lost a sibling too, and I recognise the challenges ready and waiting to ambush you throughout your life, so yes I'm very interested in the book by now, and to be honest who cares if the David Tennant thing doesn't happen because I can't load the file or something, I'll write about this one anyway.

And my chest went tight and my eyes welled up countless times as I sat alongside young Jamie and listened and watched as the chaos, in the aftermath of the massive tragedy that had killed his older sister Rose, unravelled his family, shattering it into fragments, and all narrated through Jamie's incredibly beguiling and natural children's voice.

Jamie had been five, his twin sisters Rose and Jasmine ten, when the tragedy happened, and in the intervening five years his parents have grieved separately, out of synch and very differently, eventually leading to the breakdown of the marriage, and a move from London to a cottage in the Lake District for Jamie, Jasmine, his Dad and Roger the cat. Whilst the remaining family are all five years older, Rose is forever ten, 'all dead and perfect' her ashes kept by Dad in an urn on the mantelpiece, and her possessions preserved and packed carefully in boxes marked SACRED for the move to Ambleside.

And whilst time may have moved on, heavens above, it hasn't helped one little bit. I often say to people if time is of any help at all it's not the actual passage of time that makes any difference but what you do in that time ... and for Family Matthews life seems worse than ever.

Mum has gone off with someone from her support group, Dad is drinking heavily and barely functioning, Jasmine, now fifteen is taking on the lion's share of the caring but also searching hard for her twin-less identity, and Jamie, starting at a new school, must find his own way as a fully-fledged but seemingly invisible mourner through a morass not of his own making, and most certainly not within the remit of his understanding.

But Jamie, like all children is very capable of feeling and sensing, he is earnest, wants to be a hero and tries desperately to be 'normal' whilst we, looking in, can see that all is very far from normal, and Annabel Pitcher captures all that perfectly in the thought and language of Jamie. 'The dog in my chest had a droopy sad tale...' says Jamie, and somehow you immediately know exactly how this heart-melting boy, who you will want to hug (and he'll squirm out of it like ten year old boys do) is feeling.

But Jamie also has special powers in the shape of magical thinking and a vivid imagination on his side, to say nothing of his precious Spiderman tee shirt as he explores countless ways to try and mend himself and his broken family. It occurred to me as I read that Jamie had clung onto his capacity for magical thinking much longer than a child usually would, and little wonder. A child may grieve a loss at a young age many times over as they grow into adulthood, Jamie had unwittingly, but very sensibly, hung on to the very thing that could help him most.

Phyllis Silverman author of A Parents Guide to Raising Grieving Children, suggests that in these situations you need a 'road map for a long journey', and that whilst children may not look 'ashen and visibly shaken...inside they are a mess', and thanks to books like Phyllis's we know a great deal more than we ever did about how children react to loss, and what they may need in the aftermath. One thing we know for sure is that for the best outcomes they need reassurance that as a family they will make it through the tragedy, and thus gain resilience to take into adulthood with them, and whilst Jamie might not have the perfect set up, and the road map might be upsidedown, he does have his sister Jasmine. And though Jasmine is in turmoil too, grieving the loss of her twin and much more, she holds it together for Jamie and all mediated through Jamie's eyes, so I was delighted to find a short story at the end of the book, where Jasmine had her say too which offered some completeness...because I had been wondering.

As always I don't want to give away too much of the plot, but Annabel Pitcher draws in several other other themes beyond grief including racial prejudice (which will become clear when you learn how Rose has died) bullying at school and yes it will all be gut-wrenching and heartbreaking along the way, and with a few twists that subvert expectations too. Annabel is not afraid to confront everyone's grief and their actions head on, including those of Jamie's mum, and in a way that will definitely require hankies, as she explores the routes that grief can insist on taking on that road map, and within a family who have all seemingly lost the same person, but may have all actually lost someone quite different, and had to deal with it in their own way, no matter how painful.

So there you have it, lured in by the promise of David Tennant reading us an extract, and now I am so glad that I looked at this a little more closely and agreed to read My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece, it is an exceptional book, confident and accomplished writing tackling a really important subject but in a unique way, and I for one will look forward to reading anything else that Annabel Pitcher writes.

And if you've read this far, here's your reward... Chapter One, some beautiful music and to make David speak for you you may have to right click on this and 'Open in New Tab'

and the the tour rolls on around the blogs through the rest of the week so do visit them to hear more thoughts on this book and listen to further extracts ..

PS News Flash :: Congratulations to Annabel Pitcher because My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece has today been shortlisted for the Red House Children's Book Award chosen and voted for entirely by children.

Sunday, October 30, 2011

The train journey up to London is a bit of a distant memory now until I check out the pictures which I can never resist taking along the way, and don't you just love a good train journey in the middle of half-term week...

Somehow I ended up in a backward-facing seat which is never my direction of choice, but hemmed in on all sides, mainly by Child R, Mother of Child R and their dog, a large lurcher/collie cross called Chippy, I decided to stay put.

I had some nervous moments over R's very precarious and inordinately large cup of juice I can tell you...

And for some reason, probably because I was in the Entertainments Carriage again, I decided to watch something. I was glad of R sitting next to me who at the age of 4 & 3/4 proved completely techno competent on the screen buttons, so I watched out of the corner of my eye as she worked through the screens and lined up Angelina Ballerina for herself and then chose my film.

Now don't ask me why I chose This is It, the final Michael Jackson film, when Julie and Julia was available and I've really been wanting to see that, but I did, and it proved in strange ways not incongruent with the Paul Robeson concert I was to see that evening.

For all his flaws, what a consummate performer Michael Jackson was, meticulous and tireless in rehearsals on stage for the projected fifty venue concert tour he was about to embark on... and there we were, cynics all saying he'd never manage it. Well sadly he didn't, but had he lived, and having now seen this film, I have no doubt this would have been the slick spectacular to beat all slick spectaculars.

I can't believe I'm recommending it so highly but I am and I do, if only for its retrospective on music that, whether we like or not, has been part of our lives since the Jackson Five first hit the charts with I Want You Back in 1969. But also with the trial of his doctor in progress somehow Michael Jackson's tragic and sad demise is in the spotlight once again...and I look at him, gifted in so many ways and wonder quite how awful life and sleeplessness must have been for him to resort to what he did. What utter desperation he must have endured.

I'm not sure if I might have been singing along with my headphones in, which may be why Child R moved across the aisle to sit on on Mother of R's lap (leaving me to stress about the precarious cup of juice) but anyway we approached the sea wall at Teignmouth, and because I was facing backwards I had a completely different view of the sea. Now usually the tide is in, it's dank and overcast and it looks a little murky and menacing, but as Michael started singing I Just Can't Stop Loving You the train emerged from the tunnel and this is what I saw...

My heart wasn't downcast, but if it had been this sight...the beach we would walk along with small children and the Tinker and my mum (who lived for many years in Teignmouth) plus the music would have been sufficient gladdening in itself.

Chippy (remember Chippy...the lurcherollie dog??) on the other hand was very downcast.

Sprawled across the aisle of the train people had to step over him and lift great huge suitcases over him precariously for the entire journey, and to the FULL VOLUME tones of Owner of Chippy and Mother of R exorting CHIPPY with much exasperation to MOVE...SHIFT...SORRY...STUPID DOG...C-H-I-P-P-Y each time, which was about every thirty seconds.

No matter by this time Michael was onto Thriller and I was gone... almost dancing perhaps.

Thursday, October 27, 2011

So I am still in London and tonight I am taking you all somewhere very special... I hope you have best frocks ready because we have been invited to the launch party for Carol Ann Duffy's latest poetry collection The Bees, so it's time for a Bee post.

I think I probably go on about it a little too much. In fact every time bee-keeping is mentioned by anyone I just can't stop myself saying it...

'I did a bee-keeping course you know, just never kept the bees.'

But I did and I would recommend a course to anyone who doesn't want to keep bees, as well as to everyone who does. The Tinker gave me the course for Christmas several years ago, and for ten winter weeks I trekked out to Duchy College for a course that taught me more than I could ever have imagined about a subject I didn't even know I was interested in.

I dug out my notes because I always take notes at evening talking things in order to stay awake, but in fact this was too interesting to fall asleep, and all over again I am captivated by the division of labour amongst the worker bees within the hive...

Age 0-6 days they clean the hive. From 3-9 days old they feed the brood... then they attend the queen feeding and grooming her, then they move onto honey processing. Between 15- 25 days they move onto hive ventilation (it's all in the wing action as I recall) and then guard duty, then onto nectar collection until death at about 6 weeks of age in summer. All 60,000 of them.

Then the queen, genetically identical to the workers but more developed because of the consumption of large amounts of 'royal jelly' in the larval stage. If the queen is lost from the hive the workers will sense the absence of her pheromones within thirty minutes, become agitated and start rearing a new one.

Easy come, easy go royalty.

As for the drones... their sole job is to mate with the queen and they will be ejected from the hive each autumn.

And then there are the hives, Nationals, or Langstroths or Smiths, it's all very technical and important and a whole new language of brood frames, foundations and supers will follow.

Then moving onto the beekeeper's year

January ~ leave aloneFebruary ~ check if need supplementary sugarMarch ~ remove the mouse guards, feed with syrup if necessaryApril - July ~ main activity of the seasonAugust ~ remove the cropOctober ~ the bees will be bringing in a lot of stores mostly from ivy, time to settle them down for winter

Sadly I seem to have the most notes on pests and diseases and then you realise how near we have come to losing something so precious in the past, and how near we could come yet again right now with the potentially disastrous Colony Collapse Disorder. In the 1920s it was the monks of Buckfast Abbey who saved our bee bacon with their hives way up on Dartmoor and out of range of infection.

I have been welded to Carol Ann Duffy's The Bees. It is as rich and as golden as you would expect and I'm reading it daily, often the same poem several days in succession, and slowly working my way through a very beautiful book and identifying powerfully with the Poet Laureate's suggestion

'......bees are the batteries of orchards, gardens, guard them.'

So all this shoud be leading to an appraisal on Carol Ann Duffy's collection but it's not because it is way too soon, her poetry takes weeks to sink in, absorb and surface for me, let alone write about, so instead it's about the email I received from Sean Borodale asking if I would be interested to see a copy of Pages From a Bee Journal, a sample of extracts from a poem-journal of beekeeping kept by Sean for two years after he took up beekeeping for the first time.

Well yes of course I would, I'm in bee-mood, and by return my copy arrived. What a wonderful evening I had with this little collection, just sixteen pages, hand stitched together (I think) and after reading the poems then digging back through all my bee books.

Based in Somerset, Sean chronicles the lives and work of the bees and the relationship between keeper and bees from the moment he collects the nucleus of his new colony from a farmer...

He wears a veil, this farmer, no glovesand lifts open a dribbly wax-clogged blackwood boxWe in our whites mute with held breath.

And I imagined them in their embarrassingly pristine brand new bee suits and that moment a week later when they pluck up the courage to have a look at their new bees for themselves...

And then the swarm. Now swarming is fascinating. Inevitable with most colonies according to our man Joe and most commonly from the third week in May to early June and usually at about midday to 2pm. Always collect a swarm in the evening he told us (as if, I thought to myself) find the queen and the rest will follow.

For Sean it's his poem of 14th June : Swarm?

...I did not expect that they would do this: go

Examine,almost crushinga thick slab of bees pouring out of the slotThey went south...False alarm, what next?

Well I was riveted and perhaps my mind is also attuned to the whole bee thing from all those Sylvia Plath bee poems, and what about all the patchwork hexagons. I tend to spot them wherever I go and they surely have their origins in honeycombs, so I wasn't likely to miss the little growing motif after each of Sean's poems as another hexagon is added.

Everything is conspiring to sit me down with a good session of hand-stitched English patchwork over papers this winter, I can feel it coming on..once I get back from this London jaunt.

But back to the launch party... OK stick with me everyone, let's go find the canapes and the Poet Laureate.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Team Edward Thomas, comprising a group of nine brave souls who volunteered for the experiment and have been reading and discussing Now All Roads Lead to France, Matthew Hollis's biography of the last years of Edward Thomas's life, have not been idle behind the scenes.

The book has opened innumerable reading trails for many of us, digressions through Helen Thomas's memoir Under Storm's Wing giving us completely new perspectives on her life now that we have more knowledge of Edward... explorations of the lives of some of the women with whom Edward had very close friendships, including the poet Eleanor Farjeon and the artist Edna Clarke Hall. Other biographies and diversions into collections of letters and other memoirs have come onto the radar too, and Fran has topped it all off for us by taking advantage of just about every location she finds herself in, unearthing an Edward Thomas connection and sending pictures.

Fran's father, Harold, who has just celebrated his ninetieth birthday and has also been on a walking holiday in the Lake District recently, is a retired British Rail architect. Into his eighties Harold took up calligraphy as a hobby (Fran and I do like to keep our respective octogenarian fathers busy) and he had already, by chance, done a beautifully illustrated and hand bound copy of Edward Thomas's poem Adlestrop...our group's chosen working name. Harold's exquisite illustrations have enchanted us and I am very grateful to Harold and Fran who have agreed I can post them here for you all to see.

The Team Edward Thomas project was all a bit of an experiment, but it seems to have worked and I know that I feel extremely fortunate to have been a part of it all because it somehow encapsulates what can be achieved... take one blog + one book + a group of enthusiastic readers, light the blue touch paper and off we go.

As we near the end of our shared journey with Now All Roads Lead to France, it has been a good time to reflect on what the book has done for me.

I feel I am nearer to the truth about a life that had been previously wrapped in some rather airy fairy romantic notions about a war poet tragically taken before his time and leaving us this wonderful legacy of words... well to an extent that is true, but my impressions are now tempered with the harsher and sometimes less palatable realities of Edward Thomas's life and loves. I won't reveal more because having finally sent our questions about the book off to Matthew Hollis, he may be addressing many of those issues in his responses which I will post here in due course.

This week a group of us (and we will be taking all of you along virtually of course) will be meeting up at Faber HQ in London to talk with Matthew in person... Nancy is flying over from the US to be there, so it will be our first and last gathering to talk about this book. Full report and pictures to follow of course.

I have come full circle and am back with the poems and not just Adlestrop, and remain grateful for the fact that, thanks to a combination of circumstances and friendships, Edward Thomas did allow that poetic grace to surface and make itself known.The poems really do reward close attention and I am getting a real feel for them now.

My current favoured one...

For these

An acre of land between the shore and the hills,Upon a ledge that shows my kingdoms three,The lovely visible earth and sky and seaWhere what the curlew needs not, the farmer tills:

A house that shall love me as I love it,Well-hedged, and honoured by a few ash-treesThat linnets, greenfinches, and goldfinchesShall often visit and make love in and flit:

A garden I need never go beyond,Broken but neat, whose sunflowers every oneAre fit to be the sign of the Rising Sun:A spring, a brook's bend, or at least a pond:

For these I ask not, but, neither too lateNor yet too early, for what men call content,And also that something may be sentTo be contented with, I ask of Fate.

I have also emerged with a much clearer understanding too of the important context of the poems on a timeline, straddling the Georgian poets and their inclination for tradition and nostalgia, via the Imagists and their precise clarity through to the Modernists spear-headed by T.S.Eliot, who just broke all the rules because that's what rules were for.

Meanwhile the redoubtable Fran again, off to France to visit family a few weeks ago, made sure that her route took her to Agny War Cemetery and a visit to Edward Thomas's final resting place on behalf of all of us.

Fran's moving account of that visit with her pictures will be on here tomorrow.

Monday, October 24, 2011

I've been in e mail conversation with Tracy Chevalier this last week about all sorts of things... our Girl With a Pearl Earring discussions on here, how Tracy and I had somehow missed each other at Port Eliot Festival on several occasions but would hope to meet there next year, about what I now hear is the fabulously quiet and peaceful Vermeer exhibition in Cambridge, and also about Why Willows Weep, the book of short stories that Tracy has just edited with Simon Prosser for The Woodland Trust.

Tracy then very kindly sent me a copy of Why Willows Weep (along with, in the interests of transparency, a copy of Girl With a Pearl Earring and Remarkable Creatures, having asked me first of course and to which I replied 'oh very yes please' inordinately fast.)

'The trees have always had some idea of what happens to them when they die. In forests they saw their neighbours toppled by wind or age and rot into the earth, and their roots sent up descriptions of peat and coal in vast beds and seams...'

When the rumour reached the trees that some may be pulped into paper, and that paper could make books and how much more interesting that might be than becoming a boring old rafter and so the ash tree dreams...and I won't spoil the ending but it's beautiful, and we were very moved as we listened on that hot July afternoon.

A real galaxy of writers have come together to support this book and every copy sold will enable the planting of five trees..

Richard Mabey on 'Why Nothing Grows Under the Beech Tree (or Does It?)

'Don't believe what they say about the word becoming flesh. The word became wood...'

Tracy Chevalier's own contribution, Why Birches Have Silver Bark... a really 21st century twist on an old fairy tale of love and rendezvous.

Salley Vickers writes the title story Why Willows Weep, and I remember Salley telling the audience at a literary event that her name, spelt with that carefully placed 'e' meant willow, and perhaps that explained her affinity for Sylvia Townsend Warner's book Lolly Willowes which Salley recommended as a favourite and I rushed out and bought.

I didn't have to walk far to find the real thing either...If you like tress you'll love these, the book is a treasure and available from The Woodland Trust here, and perhaps this quote from an interview with Jill Butler from the charity says it all...

"You can't create ancient trees you can only let them grow, and we need the new trees in the ground that will become the ancients of the future,"

and here's an out-take...

'I know where the holly berries are but I'll need some help.... can you just climb up there ...no...hold the book nearer the berries... no don't be daft, I've got to be able to see the title.....can you move your thumb...'

Saturday, October 22, 2011

Well, there have been quite a few but some that I definitely wanted to bring to your attention because they have certainly attracted mine, and for reasons various as you will see.

Apologies for Virginia, she's become a bit of a media tart, sneaking into all the pictures at the moment.Blooms of Darkness ~ Aharon Appelfeld

I picked up a handful of novels by Aharon Appelfeld some years ago and knew that I would read these books by, in the words of Philip Roth, 'fiction's foremost chronicler of the Holocaust', all in good time. I see I managed one in 2007, The Retreat but none since, so I am grateful for the arrival of Blooms of Darkness as a timely reminder of a great author.... eleven-year-old Hugo is brought by his mother to live in the comparitive safety of a brothel and with the prostitute Mariana, whilst the ghetto around them is being liquidated by the Nazis. Whilst Mariana's life spirals downwards, Hugo's need to protect her will grow into love....

The Wine of Solitude ~ Irene Nemoirovsky

I think I may have been begging for Sandra Smith to hurry up with the translation of The Wine of Solitude after I had read mention of it in various books about Irene Nemirovksy, and finally a copy has arrived. Considered to be the most autobiographical of Irene's fiction, this novel traces the troubled relationship between a young girl and her mother and via the Great War and the Russian Revolution as Helene rgows from an unhappy child to an angry young woman. I need to be in right frame of mind to read Irene (something saddens me every time I pick up one of her books) so next time I am this will be my choice. And my thanks to Nancy who sent me a link to this fascinating article about Irene's own daughters' experiences of growing up with her.

How it All Began ~ Penelope Lively

A new book from Penelope Lively is always a joy and this one, with its random event that sets off a chain of others, explores just how marriages can fracture and heal themselves, how opportunities may appear and disappear, how lovers who may never have met somehow do and I can't wait to read it...and gorgeous cover too.

It's Fine By Me ~ Per Petterson

More cause for celebration, a new novel from Per Petterson, a much-loved author here, I haven't read a duff one yet and still have Per Peterson's talk at Dartington a few years ago ringing in my head, about the way he just knows the very instant a book must end, and how tortuous the translation process from Norwegian to English can be when he is so attuned to sentence rhythm. Audun, starting in his new school is asked to describe his former life in the country...so will he reveal the times he has spent living in cardboard boxes, or the day his drunken father fired shots into the ceiling. Now living with his mother in the working class end of Oslo and happy to talk endlessly about Hemingway and Jack London, Audun will have to make some choices about which direction his life may go next.

Catch 22 ~ Joseph Heller

Well I've been meaning to re-read it for years after reading it when I was about eighteen purely to impress a then boyfriend who did eventually dump me, and even though I did read Catch 22 when I should probably have been concentrating on Hamlet or Our Mutual Friend. But a new fiftieth annivesary edition has arrived and I'm tempted...should I?? Will it still make me laugh??

Next to Love ~ Ellen Feldman

I really did enjoy Ellen Feldman's writing in Scottsboro so what will I make of Next to Love. Three friends, newly married to their first loves at the outbreak of World War Two and with the men away fighting are faced with the arrival of sixteen telegrams one morning bearing news...the promise is of a 'remarkable novel you are unlikely to forget.

Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm ~ Stella Gibbons

So even though everyone says there is nothing to match Cold Comfort Farm I'm still delighted at the thought of this collection of festive stories with Adam Lambsbreath handing out unpleasant gifts, and the half-crazed Starkadders searching for the symbols of ill-luck in the Christmas pudding... Reuben finds the bad sixpence which means he will lose his memory all year, but who's going to find the coffin nail... delicious, can't wait but will set this aside for December.

Silk Road ~ Colin Falconer

I've been eying this on the shelf since it arrived and even had a quick glance and I think I could leap into the world of the Knights Templar and survive if Colin Falconer is in the driving seat. It looks epic and big but it is a period of history I know pathetically little about, so in blank-slate-mode I would have no preconceptions about any of it. In fact I'll be fooled by anything in that case won't I. I do quite like the sound of a writer who was a cabbie before working as a journalist and scriptwriter, and who travelled the Silk Road through China for his research, apparently braving dog smugglers, projectile vomit and faulty streering rods whilst negotiating U-bends on sheer cliffs ... the man deserves my attention if only as thanks for his perseverance.

Nightwoods ~ Charles Frazier

Loved Cold Mountain, missed reading Thirteen Moons though have it here, and now Nightwoods has arrived and...er...er.. I really like the cover. Luce acts as caretaker to a dilapidated and isolated holiday lodge on the shores of a lake, her days are long and peaceful and solitary until the stranger children come, bringing fire, and murder and love. Right, I'm convinced I have to give it a go because it looks lovely next to the yellow in the kitchen.

Friday, October 21, 2011

Sadly I couldn't get there myself but I despatched an envoy to Sebastian Barry's event at Topping's Bookshop in Bath, and my thanks to Carol who has sent in her report of what sounds like a truly memorable event...

So, there I was in a good seat with a small notebook, and trying to look as unlike a blog spy as I could (think I got away with it!). In came a tall, handsome (more handsome than the pictures) man who immediately engaged with the audience by telling us he was going to sing!

Sebastian Barry introduced On Canaan's Side and set it in the context of his other stories, saying he felt like the co-author or editor, as this was Lilly's history and he was just re-telling it. Incidentally, he always spoke of his characters as if they were real people, more than any other author I've heard - at the end he was recounting the day the Queen came to Dublin and said he knew that Lilly's house was just along the way in the precincts of Dublin Castle, but the Queen of course didn't know that!

He described Lilly and Tadg when they were first together and that time when we are just realising we may have met our life's partner, and we keep on darting little glances at them, wanting to see them, and half hoping to have the glance returned, but half hoping not to be seen. He then began to read the passage when Lilly describes the visit to the gallery in Chicago (will say no more for fear of spoilers).

Well, that was when the whole room came alight. Sebastian did indeed sing - a snatch of the the folk song from the book, in a real singer's voice, and then launched into Lilly's persona, voice, stance - it was much more than just a reading and as I felt a broad grin creep across my face at the sheer exuberance of it, I glanced to each side of me and many others were grinning too.He went on through this dramatic episode, raising the tension, raising, raising, until his voice dropped at the end of the passage, for reasons those of you who have read it will remember. He was visibly moved, wiping his brow before turning to the audience as himself again.

It's not many authors who gain ringing applause at the end of each section of their reading, but I think we were so affected by the drama it seemed the only thing to do. Immediately there was a question about the tradition of the shanachie or storyteller in Ireland. He said his mother had been an actor and he had learned about words from sitting in rehearsal rooms as a child.

Sebastian Barry then spoke about the theme of violence in history, quoting Desmond Tutu as saying there was nothing a man could do that he wouldn't have done in other circumstances. Then describing a relation of his a couple of generations back who had fled to America after being given a death sentence related to the murder of Michael Collins. This had been hushed up in the family and other family members had a quite different explanation (which they believed) for him emigrating.

He clearly has an interesting history himself, with forebears on both sides of the divide and he spoke a lot about the theme of forgiveness. In a 'grown up' country there is a hunger to delve back into the secrets as it is only by knowing about the roots that you get rid of the lingering fear.

After reading two more passages and singing a little more we had to be dragged back to reality by the clock. This was a truly bravura performance by a very warm, engaging, funny and emotional man and made me realise, not for the first time, how very lucky we are in Bath to have Topping's and their commitment to bringing the very best authors to speak.

Sorry to go on, but what a glorious surprise this book is proving to be. I hadn't realised quite how ready I was for a completely new reading direction, or that I would be totally and utterly mesmerised by Haruki Murakami's 1Q84, and I can see the sense and pleasure, if only it were possible, of this approach to reading it as recommended by the Los Angeles Times...

Here's an unorthodox suggestion: Try to read Haruki Murakami's "1Q84" in as close to a single sitting as you can. It won't be easy — the novel clocks in at 926 pages and is often densely allusive, if readable throughout. Still, there's something about the book that requires the deep immersion, the otherworldly sense of connection/disconnection, that only an extended plunge allows. You want to get up from these pages feeling groggy, as if you've been wrenched out of everyday experience, drawn into a landscape where the boundary between reality and imagination has been rendered moot.

I can see exactly how that would work here because 150 pages in the book is completely hypnotising and has been very difficult to put down, it really is a wrench to leave this increasingly strange world that Murakami describes, peopled by even stranger, slightly off-kilter characters doing even more slightly off- kilter things

I'm not sure if this is typical of his style or not, I'll leave that to all you experts out there, but what should at times be seemingly monotonous if not boringly excessive detail has me gripped and engaged at every level and with a narrative voice that I love. Every detail matters and I don't want to miss a single thing.

Thankfully all this coincides with a week off work and some travel, so plenty of reading time to come and thank goodness there will be no year-long-interest-sapping wait for Book Three, out next Tuesday.

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Yes I will often feel a little too embarrassed to do that (even after all this time) and if it is something I really want I will buy it.

Yes I will then hunt around for the best value.

Yes that is often on Amazon.

Yes I do have a Kindle.

Yes I do love it.

Yes I am on a limited book budget

Oh I could go on and on offloading the guilt-ridden confessions but when Ron of the Plymouth Bookshops (and who we see at Port Eliot each year) put out a tweet that he was really excited about Tuesday 18th October, and not because it was the day of the Booker Prize,

looking forward to murakami day tues can't wait free cd janacek sinfonietta with each book. Its the music which binds your soul to 1Q84

So publication day for the latest offering from Haruki Murakami and 1Q84 clearly a book that Ron rates very highly and with which there would be a free CD with very copy bought.

Now I've had my eye on this one. It sold over a million copies in the first month of publication in Japan, and whilst I have never really focused my attention on Haruki Murakami I had always planned to one day. But this sounds like a real epic and I love the sound of it...

The year is 1984. Aomame sits in a taxi on the expressway in Tokyo.

Her work is not the kind which can be discussed in public but she is in a hurry to carry out an assignment and, with the traffic at a stand-still, the driver proposes a solution. She agrees, but as a result of her actions starts to feel increasingly detached from the real world. She has been on a top-secret mission, and her next job will lead her to encounter the apparently superhuman founder of a religious cult.

Meanwhile, Tengo is leading a nondescript life but wishes to become a writer. He inadvertently becomes involved in a strange affair surrounding a literary prize to which a mysterious seventeen-year-old girl has submitted her remarkable first novel. It seems to be based on her own experiences and moves readers in unusual ways. Can her story really be true?

Both Aomame and Tengo notice that the world has grown strange; both realise that they are indispensable to each other. While their stories influence one another, at times by accident and at times intentionally, the two come closer and closer to intertwining.

I half wondered whether a gift-wrapped copy might appear in the post from the publishers, which it hadn't... not even an un-gift-wrapped one. I'm sure I could have asked for one and it would have arrived, but I had decided to have the buying pleasure and nab it at £9.99 on Amazon, or perhaps the £8.99 Kindle version, until Ron's tweet that is.

Then I thought perhaps I'd actually buy into the publication day buzz and drive into Ron's shop in Plymouth, The University Bookseller.. and buy a copy there.

Hmm this is the problem...

£8 for petrol, £4.50 to park, £10 for lunch, £30 for things I didn't really need in M&S but might as well get while I'm in there, ditto £20 in Boots, plus £20 for the book, and probably £20 for another couple that I saw and liked the look of but didn't really need (that new Alexandra Harris biography of Virginia Woolf probably) so over £100 for a book.

Does anyone else have this trouble.

That's why I sometimes shop on Amazon.

Anyway I tweeted back (and bearing in mind I am a very recalcitrant tweeter because I just can't believe people are interested in my 140 letters + spaces epithets) 'Will you have them in the Plymouth shop.' and it's true, not many people would be riveted by that.

'Yes' replies Ron 'shall I drop you one round?'..again not of international interest or likely to 'trend' ( which is what happens when you stir up a twitter storm and everyone's talking about you,) but Ron lives just over the way from us on the other side of the Tamar Valley.

'Oh yes please, as long as I get the free CD, and you are faster than Amazon?' (73 characters)

Incidentally Ron did tell me to look at Hive as an alternative place to buy online and I am...

Anyway true to his word the Bookseller came to dovegreyreader bearing the book on the morning of publication day, and I now have it in my hands (incidentally there was no way the cat was moving from that spot.)

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

So it's the sixth year that I have covered the Booker on here, except this year I've hardly covered it at all. Time and whim have run away with me as my reading has dashed off on a frolic of its own.

But what a strange and controversial Booker year we are in the midst of, what with internecine combat over on the Man Booker forum and then the usual bold pronouncements that the longlist has sold the most copies ever...a bit like A level results really, year on year it has to be more to prove it's doing a good job.

Now there's been all the kerfuffle and hot-under-the-collar chestnuts (let the hedgerows speak... picked this bowlful along the lane) about quality and standards, and what's literary and what's not and who decides what exactly is 'a readable book'...

"For many years this brief was fulfilled by the Booker (latterly the Man Booker) Prize. But as numerous statements by that prize's administrator and this year's judges illustrate, it now prioritises a notion of 'readability' over artistic achievement,"

Hmm, 'readability'...'artistic achievement'...this could get messy because now everyone out there is trying to define what that may mean. Personally I would be more inclined to make a rather foggy distinction about a book where what happens is all that happens, versus a book where most of what happens doesn't happen where and in the way that you first think it has, and that may only dawn on you days if not weeks later and you know the book is a keeper because you would read it again...and again ... muddled, yes, but I think I know what I mean.

So column inches now adding up to several miles plus a great big debate over at the Bookseller about the possibility of a new prize to uphold these standards whatever they are...

The Literature Prize, for which funding is "currently" being procured, will be awarded to the best novel written in the English language and published in the UK in a given year, with the writer's country of origin not a factor.

Hilary Mantel, talking in that recent TV interview, felt that she could never become the writer she was meant to be until she had won the ultimate recognition of the Booker Prize. That recognition meant everything to her, and I can't help but wonder about the impact of all this argy bargy on the authors. I'm sure only a small proportion of us work in such an overtly prize-driven environment... I have never won anything in about thirty years in the NHS apart from hyacinth-scented bath cubes in Friends of the Surgery raffles.

I have this sad, and I hope misplaced vision of writers out there whose writing lives may be predicated on the dream of prizes, because the industry almost demands it, and who are sitting in their writing sheds thinking...

'So what do I have to do to win this thing... to win anything...'

And feeling demoralised.

Well I suppose you've got to write a prize-winning book, but I'm not sure anyone can know what one of those might be. Literary prizes largely funded by private money will surely always be about judges various and their own personal literary background and subjective personal taste, all laced with a big dollop of compromise I suspect, so no point in second-guessing though we all love to stick an oar in.

But feel the need to fly the flag for the authors and I'm not sure many of us write actual letters to them these days, real paper ones. I'm wondering if any of you do.. or may have done in the past, and if so did you get a reply??

I'm starting to feel I should because it gave me great pleasure to write proper paper thank-you letters to all the writers who visited the dovegreyreader tent at Port Eliot Festival this year, and it's something I don't do often enough in these days of e mail.

And I wonder too... if there are any authors reading this, what does receiving a real letter mean to you??

If I wrote to an author right now, this very week, I'd be sitting here at my tiny Emily Dickinson-sized writing desk at the bedroom window. I would of course want to thank them for their book and tell them why, but I hope it wouldn't be seen as impertinent or patronizing to then urge them not to be downhearted about all this Booker (and Literary Prize) shenanigans, which all seems in danger of own-goaling and damp squibbing itself from where I'm sitting (which is a very long way away). I'd want to say please just ignore this prize lark and get your head down and keep writing, because for all that I witter on about prize lists here, my preference rarely wins anyway so perhaps they aren't worth a fig when you are giving me the books you do.

'Life in all its messiness...characters allowed to make moral choices which may or may not be the author's and shaped by those choices for good or ill...Where everyone has a right to be understood : that's what impels the creative imagination of the writer and the empathetic response of the reader. The possibility, through a listening that is not judgemental, of getting inside another's skin, the enlarging of your own understanding of what it is to be someone else... an awakening of an awareness of other realities, other personalities, other people's lives.'

And he quotes Seamus Heaney who talks of...

'writers who can lift the reader's hand and put it down on the bare wire of the present': an image, a phrase, an idea, that strikes us as true, even universal. No matter when or where a writer lived his or her life he or she may tell you something you need to know about your own.'

And we'd all probably add a zillion more ideas of our own to that suggestion, but I hope we'd all agree that we find that very extra something in novels various on a regular basis. Michael Mayne, whilst feeling 'overwhelmed by the sheer weight of books demanding attention and the shortness of time ahead', freely admits...

'I have learned much more about human nature and, I believe, about the transcendent, about good and evil, sin and grace - from the novelist and the poet than from the theologian where only rare writers combine the insight, the humanity and the sheer readability that draw you back to them.'

Perhaps that's what matters to us ordinary readers me hearties, the insight, humanity and sheer readability that draws us back time and again... not the prizes.

Monday, October 17, 2011

'There is a different country we enter when we suffer, and that those who have learned to feel their way through different forms of darkness, and spent time - for whatever reason - treading its paths, recognise each other and are more likely to turn to those who have been there too. The gift of empathy is all the better for being hard-won,'

...the words of Michael Mayne in his introduction to The Enduring Melody.

It is several years since I read Susan Hill's staunch and sincere recommend of Michael Mayne's book, in the days when she wrote a blog on her website. Michael Mayne had been a personal friend of Susan's, the Dean Emeritus of Westminster and former Head of Religious Programmes (Radio) at the BBC.

I swiftly bought the book and then couldn't read it.

My early edition has the lovely Samuel Palmer pen and ink wash painting The Bright Cloud on the cover which I thought apt and which made the book seem very enticing, but perhaps Ronald Blythe in his 'puff' on that cover encapsulates why I may have bottled out..

'An autobiography of dying. It was brave to write it and it needs courage to read it, but the benefits are enormous...'

Clearly and despite all the benefits therin my courage failed me back in 2006, but that was before I had embarked on the day job I do now which has involved intensive revision and updating of my training as a bereavement counsellor in the early 1990s.

So when I picked up The Enduring Melody again last week I shouldn't have been surprised to find it was like a completely different 'me' opening the first page, because I now see I have developed the strategies that give me that courage to proceed.. so this is not a health warning exactly, but you may want to be aware that whilst the book starts in health, and that was the intention throughout, it becomes something very different and at times distressing when Michael Mayne is diagnosed with what proves to be a highly malignant tumour of his jaw. He finds himself navigating his way through the 'questioning country of cancer' and that was not on the itinerary.

Ronald Blythe goes on to say...

'Michael Mayne belongs to the great priest-writers. He takes on the issues of mortality, both in religion and literature, and makes us all discover what pain has taught him. It is a wonderful achievement.'

I don't know many priest-writers but I'd put Gerard Hughes and Thomas Merton on my list for sure.

Alan Bennett, another close friend of Michael Mayne's describes the book thus

' An heroic book.... his courage, his humour and his tone of voice do not desert him; humbling and inspiring, it is a validation both of his faith and his humanity.'

I should comment on the 'faith' aspect too.

I would not normally pick up a book that described Christianity in quite so much depth, and I will admit that I skimmed a few parts. Whilst I know they were an essential part of Michael Mayne's journey, and a real questioning and affirmation of his lifelong beliefs when put to the test, for a lapsed Anglican like myself the theology seemed of less relevance on this reading. For anyone with a particular interest, that will be essential reading whilst the medical and literary content may not... so this is a book that can be read selectively.

That is in no way to detract from all the threads of his life that Michael Mayne skillfully weaves together as he explores the ways in which the kaleidoscope of his life 'has slipped a little,' and what subsequently supports him through the harrowing process of the surgery, the treatment and the pain of his final illness. Not only his faith, and prayer as stillness rather than supplication, but his family, his marriage, his music and books and a wonderful selection of old films.

He watches Casablanca, Top Hat, Cinema Paradiso, and The Big Sleep and his diagnosis comes just before the BBC Proms season so there is the readily available music too.

I was a first time Prommer proper this year in that I made a point of checking what was on each night and listening if I wanted to...never again will I miss the Proms, and fancy it taking me so long to make them a part of my summer.

And Michael Mayne's reading is far-ranging...

The Mysteries of Glass by Sue Gee

Findings by Kathleen Jamie

Making it Up by Penelope Lively

Snow by Orhan Pamuk

Author, Author by David Lodge

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

After the Victorians by A.N Wilson

Old Filth by Jane Gardam

Grace and Truth by Jennifer Johnston

The short stories of William Maxwell help him through the sleepless hours before his surgery, and for which he was in the operating theatre for twelve hours. And then countless authors and poets are mentioned in more general terms, Edward Thomas, Vikram Seth ( a close friend and confidante), Carol Ann Duffy, D.H.Lawrence, John McGahern, Hilary Mantel, John Burnside, Andrei Makine and many more.

There is frequent reference to T.S.Eliot's Four Quartets, a book I read carefully for the first time only last year, but I have a recording of Ralph Fiennes reading it which I will now listen to because somehow The Enduring Melody is also about the transcendence and transforming power of words and how much they can achieve, and about what Michael Mayne calls the Cantus Firmus of his own life, the fixed ground of a lifelong melody.

And whilst that may all sound horribly pretentious taken out of context, it is not in the slightest in this book, more a real testament to the power of this book that I felt such a genuiness about those foundations, and in ways that I could indentify with whilst formulating my own version.

Michael Mayne's voice is deeply self-effacing and honest as he faces up to a devastating final illness, and I think different aspects may shine through for different readers here, but above all what will shine through for everyone is a man of limitless spiritual and personal humility who has left us a wonderful legacy with this book, a melody I have finally listened to and heard and one that will most certainly endure.

Friday, October 14, 2011

I did say it would just mysteriously appear...the circus quietly settling into place overnight, and don't miss Kimbofo's evening of adventure at the fabulous launch party for The Night Circus earlier this week. There is a raft of publicity for this book most of which has passed me by down here where we are much more exercised about the fact that dogs may be banned from Tavistock's Pannier Market, and Seth Lakeman says this is ridiculous because the market was built for animals in the first place and his dog Bernie wouldn't be able to get his sausage from Bob's Cafe... and I didn't get the gift-wrapped edition of the book either so wasn't particularly alerted to anything special about this one.

But I think backalong we had safely ascertained that Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus is not Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus and that to make any comparisons would be plain daft.

Nor did we think that anyone who writes anything that even vaguely tiptoes around the magical realism genre harbours ambitions to create another Harry, or is attempting to be the next J.K.Rowling

Good.

But I probably would make comparisons with Susannah Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (and you can read why I loved it here) if only for trying to decide what may be the allure of the book with the black-edged pages. They don't all work their magic, but when they do, and the contents have that genuine feel of the night, and mystery and darkness about them I'm a sucker. But then turn the page and find a black page with a burst of stars across and that feels like a little bit of a magical invitation too.

Marco, the 'sorcerer's apprentice' and Celia, the 'enchanter's daughter' are to be opponents in a contest of magic not of their own choosing but of their respective masters, and one that will be played out within the mysterious confines of Le Cirque des Reves. The circus that appears at night, opens to the public only at night and mysteriously moves on at night, constructed only in black and white and who can know where the train that glides smoothly and quietly may pitch up next, perhaps Dresden but might be Concorde, Massachussets, as it strives for 'uniqueness in a world of sameness'.

And sometimes I realise I want that 'uniqueness' from a book too.

Incidentally I don't often read a book without a dust jacket but this one I did because a really nice surprise lies beneath the UK edition (and my apologies to Erin Morgenstern, I'm afraid I stole this picture off your blog and without even asking)

It is 1886 and The Night Circus requires some sharp attention to the dates at the beginning of each chapter. Expect yourself to be whisked forward and then backwards in time as Erin Morgenstern weaves and unweaves her tale and then blends it back together again, as Marco and Celia aim to outwit each other with their magical powers. The fin de siecle setting gives the book that perfect sense of uncertainty and revision, a time of change with the unknown promise of the future, and as time is manipulated around a central motif of the circus clock, a fantastical 'dreamlike' apparatus, and clock-making generally, the book seemed to create its own time warp around me.

If I'm honest I can't say I was completely won over by the 'life-affirming love story' or even 'the deadly contest' because in many ways for me the plot was buried so deeply in all this magic and nipping back and forth in time, that I was hugely and pleasurably distracted. Especially by the way in which Erin Morgenstern's astonishingly vivid imagination made the unbelievable believable...in other words I fell for it all, and how I wish Great Western could sort out the Entertainments Carriage on their trains like this...

Inside the train is opulent, gilded, and warm. Most of the passenger cars are lined with thick patterned carpets, upholstered in velvets in burgundies and violets and creams, as though they have been dipped in a sunset, hovering at tiwlight and holding onto the colours before they fade to midnight and stars...'

It would just make the trip to London so much more enjoyable.

The book is incredibly visual, rich with imagery and blazes of colour against the black and white backdrop of the circus with its occasional accents of red, so no surprise that the film rights have been snapped up on this sensory reading experience. If it goes into production it will be a sumptuous extravaganza of a film and I'll be there, because it has doves in it of course and I will be wearing a red scarf with cables for sure (I predict a craze and a Debbie Bliss pattern for one any day)

There is illusion and delusion, shape-shifting, manipulation and deceit, misdirection and more often than not all is definitely not what it seems as the story unfolds, and if you are as unforgiving as I am of entire books written in the present tense, in this case, as you read you will see why it is necessary. The present tense embraces shifting time whether past or future, it is actually always the present ...see I can hardly make sense of it myself, you need to read it to see how well it works.

And yes I was enchanted, and I did run away with the circus as young Bailey does, and as I closed the book of course I came back to reality gently wondering whether I was supposed to be thinking, how long before Bailey meets Mr Barnum.

Erin Morgenstern acknowledges several influences at play here...The Tempest, Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and she does pay homage to Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and its battle of the magicians which I am delighted about...I still recall the Christmas that nearly never happened here because I picked that heft of a book up about a week before and disappeared into it much as I have done with The Night Circus.

So there you have it, if magic's not your thing then worry not, but if you are in the mood for some enchantment keep an eye out, the Le Cirque des Reves might just be heading your way once it moves on from here.

Monday, October 10, 2011

'To remember sometimes is a great sorrow, but when the remembering has been done, there comes afterwards a very curious peacefulness. Because you have planted your flag on the summit of your sorrow. You have climbed it.'

Lilly Bere's voice towards the end of her long and deeply poignant memoir as recounted in Sebastian Barry's latest novel On Canaan's Side, and if you are au fait with all things Sebastian you may recall that Lilly was the youngest sister of Willie Dunne, the young soldier and the subject of the Best Book Not to Win the Booker (imho) A Long Long Way.

On Canaan's Side incidentally Another Best Book Not to Win the Booker (again imho)

I had been putting off reading this one. I love Sebastian Barry's writing so much but it's a love that comes with a fear attached to it... that the next book won't work the same magic. Needless fear, how could I have doubted an author I trust I now say, because as Lilly comes to life in her own right on these pages it was like slipping back into the fold of a family I already knew. The scene is soon set sufficiently for the reader to know that eighty-nine-year-old Lilly is mourning the loss of her grandson Bill, her breaking heart making 'a small slight sound' as it comes asunder from grief.

Each chapter is titled First Day without Bill, Second Day without Bill etc and if you can bear to read this book at a chapter a day as I have tried to (some days I just had to read the next one) you might find it pays you back handsomely. Allowing time to digest and understand the full import of all that happens to Lilly, whilst being alongside her over an extended period of time, turned this book into much more than another book read for me, it became reading as experience.

It is just after the Great War, Ireland is in turmoil and Lilly must flee Dublin with her boyfriend Tadg Bere when Tadg's loyalist part in an IRA ambush is discovered. Four of the IRA men are killed and Tadg will be the subject of a revenge killing for sure, and Lilly may be targeted for her father's police connections, so overnight Tadg and Lilly find themselves fugitives en route to the Promised Land that is America.

'Clothed in my American self' Lilly slowly comes into being in her own right as the story of her life unfolds, chapter by chapter and interspersed with the here and now of her most recent bereavement. The book will arc across almost a century of history, and Lilly's menfolk will play their part in the damaging conflicts of that century, from Willie's role in the Great War, to Lilly's son Ed's drafting to Vietnam, and grandson Bill's to Iraq.

Meanwhile Lilly must assimilate into a new country and several new lives throughout which she will know much hard work and tragedy. Lilly consistently makes the pact with life rather than death but her energy and resilience are running low...

That's a lot to expect from one novel, let alone in any depth, but this is Sebastian Barry, one of those authors who makes every word do its work. All of my single words are completely encapsulated in Lilly's life, but especially fear, because who can know whether the unrequited revenge will follow them to America...

'Fear is a force like seasickness, could you call it a life-sickness, a terrible nausea caused by dread, creeping dread that seems to withdraw a little in dreams while you sleep, but then, just a few moments after waking, rushes back close to you, and begins to gnaw at your simple requirement for human peace.'

When you know what has happened to Lilly, and when you discover what is to come, you may just live and understand her fear as you read that, and perhaps then think of versions and moments of your own fear and really know.

There were moments when I was relieved to hold to my reading strategy of a chapter a day. Sebastian Barry is capable of delivering the emotional body blow that takes my breath away and needs time to recover. There are very few books that I have to set aside two chapters from the end in order to take in that emotional wallop, something that has undone me with its intensity, and for those who suggest the ending of On Canaan's Side seems rushed... well mine wasn't because I gave myself a day to absorb what I'd read so far and to prepare for it. The very next thing I would recommend when you finish the book is to try turning to the first two chapters and reading them once more. If you have read as I did it will be seventeen days since you were there, and I had been so deeply immersed in Lilly and her life that I had, like Lilly perhaps, almost forgotten how much I already knew.

It was hard to know what to pick up next once I had finished On Canaan's Side. It is one of those books that makes you dissatisfied with everything else you start, so I have hunkered down with some non-fiction and am reading Michael Mayne's memoir The Enduring Melody properly for the first time. Much more about this one soon; Michael Mayne, Dean Emeritus of Westminster and former Head of Religious Programmes (Radio) at the BBC, and a book 'begun in health, as a meditation on a lifetime's faith and experience' and ended in what Alan Bennet calls 'mortal sickness', as Michael Mayne faces death from an incurable cancer. It sounds morbid, but far from it. This is a book full of spirituality, joy and compassion but also about Michael Mayne's own reading life.

I had ended this post with some piffle thoughts about why I read, and why books like On Canaan's Side are so important for me, but I've crossed all that out because I think Michael Mayne says it too, and much better than I can...

'Life in all its messiness...characters allowed to make moral choices which may or may not be the author's and shaped by those choices for good or ill...Where everyone has a right to be understood : that's what impels the creative imagination of the writer and the empathetic response of the reader. The possibility, through a listening that is not judgemental, of getting inside another's skin, the enlarging of your own understanding of what it is to be someone else... an awakening of an awareness of other realities, other personalities, other people's lives.'

He talks further, quoting George Steiner on the limitations of words and how hard it can be to describe that experience we all know so well, of entering into a deeply personal relationship with a book, or a poem or picture.

Ultimately words may fail us, and indeed words may have their limitations, but thankfully not when it is Sebastian Barry who is writing them.

Saturday, October 08, 2011

'Good heavens ...just L-O-O-K at Waterstone's ' I exclaimed to Bookhound yesterday as we stepped out of Michael Caines's cafe in the Royal Clarence Hotel, and onto Cathedral Green in Exeter. We'd just had a light liquid lunch, and had it been anything stronger than the delicious vegetable soup I might have thought I was hallucinating.

Now I don't want to cast aspersions on the literary enthusiasms of the residents of Exeter, but it is very unusual... if not unheard of in living memory, for us to stumble across a queue to get into Waterstone's that snakes right along the road and curves round as far as the west front of the Cathedral.

For anyone who is not following Waterstone's news or has never heard of, I'd better do you a potted catch-up of the last thirty years.

Now the UK's last remaining high street bookshop chain, and my book-buying paradise back in the 1980s, with the black shelves (how I loved them and how I have hated the white make-over) that made the books look as distinguished as they were. An oasis for me because Waterstone's was the one-stop-shop to go to for an eclectic and unusual selection of reading.

Those felt like the days when Waterstone's seemed 'bothered' about its customers, not bothered by them, and of course the Indies were up in arms about the competition little knowing what was on the horizon, and who'd have thought so many of us would now be rooting for this national institution to survive. I've done my bit for them over the years, in fact you know it's me you have to thank for supporting the Loyalty Card pilot scheme in the Plymouth store so assiduously that it was probably rolled out nationally way ahead of schedule.

The Waterstone's salvation buy-out this year has been with Russian money, but the captain charged with turning the shop around is James Daunt, he of Daunt's bookshops in London. If I confess anew that I now have some of my own shelves nicely organised according to country of author, that should tell you how influenced I am by all things Daunts, which does likewise (they thought of it before I did.) I go out of my way to spend an hour and some money at 83 Marylebone High Street whenever I am in London, but also for an hour in Foyles and the Waterstone's flagship store in Piccadilly.

So back to Waterstone's in Exeter and it was obvious the two very large bouncers on the door, to say nothing of the law of the queue, were not going to let me in the back way, so I wandered around to the front entrance on the High Street for my customary browse and to see what all the fuss was about.

In fact it was .... er ...er James Corden doing a book signing.

If you are asking James Who, it's all here and I do enjoy his humour. He's starring in a play that is getting rave reviews and is on in Plymouth at the moment and we should have booked tickets. So I am not in any way denigrating his presence, or everyone's rather hysterical reaction to it, because let's be frank, if it had been say Sebastian Barry I'd have been the same.

Anyway, I kid you not people of all ages were ecstatic, apart from one elderly couple who were far from, and could not understand why a book signing by someone they had never heard of meant half the shop had to be shut off and they couldn't get to the books they wanted.

I had actually been planning to buy Meg Rosoff's There is No Dog, and would have paid full whack too... but the shop was 'cordoned' off (sorry couldn't resist) .

'Oh my God, did you see the way James smiled at me??'

'I can't believe I have been in the same room as James Corden....this is amazing. James Corden in Exeter, that is fantastic'

'Did he give you a sweet....no? Oh he gave me a sweet...'

And it wasn't pretty to see the woman who dashed in the front door thinking she could walk through only to be told she would have to go around to the back door, and in any case the signing queue was now closed because James Corden had to be somewhere else by next Easter. I'd not seen someone have a nervous breakdown in a bookshop lately, she'll probably need counselling.

Hands up, I've just finished On Canaan's Side, I'd be the same about Sebastian Barry, really I would, it's all relative.

So the shop was busy and everyone was clutching cuddly James Corden's book to their bosom except me, but I did manage to have a good look around, because I am interested to see how the new Waterstone's will shape up and will I notice any changes. Might it even start to look and feel like a 21st century version of the bookshop I remember that launched me on a wealth of new and exciting reading trails back in the 1980s, and at a time when I desperately needed them after those years of having babies seemed to have turned my brain to mush.

It's early days but the message must be filtering down from on high because I can see immediately it's starting to look more like a bookshop again and much less like a bazaar.

The 3 for 2 tables have gone for a start, and the pesky stickers, what a blessed relief that is.

Gone is the temptation to buy one book I may want and two I don't, and that I know are only there because publishers have paid for them to be so.... and I don't blame them, they had little choice. I'd like to believe that all publisher payments of this kind have vanished from the Waterstone's coffers, but I'm not sure.

So we have a return to good old book egalitarianism, everything in its proper place on the shelf and the tables are back to the old ways... selections of books...literary fiction, books in translation, short stories... I did a dovegreyreader shelf in the Plymouth store for a while, it was great fun to do but it fizzled, probably because my choices looked a little too esoteric next to the 3 for 2s. It took a lot of time and thought too and for no payment, so I couldn't sustain that when there is the gas bill to be paid.

But there were some special displays in the Exeter store that really warmed the cockles...

Little Toller Books looking perfect... A William Maxwell shelf, can you believe that, having barely found a William Maxwell book in the shop before now they have all of them, and with the bookseller notes too.A really stunning table by the door featuring amongst others a selection of these books on the painting of Eric Ravilious....want...all. And prominence given to the classics as never before, though personally I think I like to see them mixed in with everything else rather than having someone define the canon for me (what do you think?) but mustn't grumble, the range was extensive and far greater than anything I have seen in Waterstones for a long time. Stock lists seem to be widening and the chances are you could now find a much lesser known classic on the shelves...Theodor Fontane for example, and not just Effie Briest, though I'm reminded it's time I read that.

And a conversation between two fresh-faced looking students overheard next to those very shelves which I was surreptitiously stroking (the books not the students)...

'Oh God, we haven't got to read this Hardy rubbish have we??

'This is going to be f ***** terrible, look at these books, all these people are so old.'

'Well I've always just watched the film the night before an exam and passed ...'

So a way to go, but setting that little exchange aside, if you frequent the stores is anyone else noticing Waterstone's improvements lately??

We could conduct a national audit, I know I shall certainly be keeping an eye on them and with my fingers crossed.

Friday, October 07, 2011

'Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or valley. For fear will rob him of it all if he gives too much.'

You wait for that moment to come in the book as you surely know it must, because the title quote has to be in there somewhere, and when it did I was poleaxed.

It is The Reader magazine (now can you believe on issue 43 and with each one I love it more and more) I have to thank for finally making me settle down to read Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Paton. A book arrives from them each quarter, a nice surprise, and I read and write fifty words on it, give it a star rating and it goes in the magazine on the Reader's Connect page.

So the dust had barely settled on Port Eliot festival and I knew I had a scant week to read this one before the deadline, and at a time when the whim was rising and the very last thing I wanted to do was read to order, so half of me was Mrs Very Reluctant and feeling a bit flopdawdle (new word) about doing anything..

But the other half had just experienced that amazing conversation with Gillian Slovo, so that half of me was Mrs Keenasmustard and fortunately she won the day, but a mere ten pages in and I was already thinking 'why on earth haven't I read this before?'

Stephen Kumalo, a minister in a remote church, who heads for Johannesburg to track down his missing son Absalom. What gradually becomes clear is that all is not well and Absalom is in serious trouble. The 'trouble' becomes increasingly serious with each place that Stephen arrives at, only to find each time that his son has moved on until eventually it is apparent that Absalom has killed a white activist during a bungled robbery. The irony of that is not lost in a city where few white people seem able to see the evils of apartheid, or the fundamental damage that has been done to 4/5ths of the people who have been given just 1/10th of the land. A people who slave to provide the gold from the mines for the remaining 1/5th living on their 9/10ths. Arthur Jarvis was one such white man and his death will have profound repercussions not least because his father is the landowner on which Stephen Kumalo's church and livelihood rest.

Writtern in 1946 and published in 1948, the year the National Party came to power and imposed apartheid, Cry the Beloved Country is a story of not only the greater broken tribe that is apartheid Africa, but also of the smaller one, the nuclear family, as two fathers mourn the 'loss' of their sons whilst striving to mend what is broken in their own lives in order to start to heal the greater damage. It is about being a parent, about internalizing the trangressions of the children and making reparation, and on a greater scale about a splintered, corrupt and fractured society in desperate need of some humanity. My eyes welled up frequently as I read Alan Paton's beautiful portrayal of two men on opposite sides of the divide struggling to make sense of what was happening around them, and both with bucketfuls of compassion for each other.

And if you haven't read Cry, the Beloved Country yet and decide you might, I wonder if like me you will find Kumalo's lone mountain vigil at dawn, at the exact moment his son is due to be executed, among the most moving of scenes you may ever have readAs Kumalo tries to imagine what his son may be thinking and doing he sets out his meal which Alan Paton then invests with a deeply Biblical significance akin to the Last Supper...

'He looked out of his clouded eyes at the faint steady lightening in the east. But he calmed himself, and took out the heavy maize cakes and the tea and put them on a stone. And he gave thanks, and broke the cakes and ate them, and drank of the tea. Then he gave himself over to deep and earnest prayer....'

Communion as Kumalo's act of faith and to be with his son in spirit in his final hours, but also I sensed something greater, as an act of solidarity with the nation and with the rest of the world. Many have argued that the country of South Africa is one of the most important characters in this book, Alan Paton confirms this in his introduction, and I see it too.

There is far more in Cry,The Beloved Country than one read could ever hope to find which is why in the end I made it only my second (I think) 5* book for The Reader, and here are some of my fifty words...

'... The tribe may be broken but never defeated while it has its Kumalos, please please be sure to read this one.'

Monday, October 03, 2011

'Historical facts about men and women born in obscurity are not easy to come by...[they] leave a body of historical evidence that is like a fine old musical instrument long infested with woodworm: some material traces of the original do survive, but these have become pock-marked with holes, till all that is left is a fragile shell and hollow space...'

Helen Berry's coda at the end of her excellent book The Castrato and His Wife is perhaps a salutory reminder of Hilary Mantel's assertion in her recent televised interview with James Runcie, that as soon as we learn history we should learn to be suspicious, that we should question. There is clearly much we cannot know for sure, but there are legitimate ways of constructing that history as Helen Berry elaborates.

'This book has endeavoured to squeeze a tune from ephemeral materials using the different varieties of time-tempered fragments that are left to us: not just the written words, but the objects, art, and the music that are the legacy of previous generations...

And Helen Berry offers a reference to an overview of this approach to history citing another book which sounds equally readable Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting and Touching in History by Mark M.Smith, and again I am reminded of Hilary Mantel showing us her shelf of reference files and reading out the odd but contemporaneously Tudor contents of one folder.

You may recall that a few months ago, the ink barely dry on the proof copy, I was waxing lyrical about this book which had arrived from Oxford University Press, Well, it has just been published, so now you can find out the mysteries of the life of the castrato for yourselves.

I'm not sure what it may be about the eighteenth century that makes my eyes glaze over, perhaps a little too far back for comfort and not helped by the fact that the literature has always defeated me despite my best efforts. Clearly all that was needed was an angle that would interest me and this new world of surgical interference and musical intrigue was just the ticket.

Now let's be honest, the book is interesting on many accounts but it is the castrato aspect that intrigues isn't it, and Helen Berry offers a fascinating background to the history and the world of castration, illegal even when a young Tenducci was parted from his bits by an intinerant barber-surgeon wielding his special shears, which could and did double for animal or human use. And all sufficient to leave our lad singing higher up the register and it was off to music school he went. Women in this era banned from church choirs, so someone had to sing the top line.

Moving from Italy to England, Tenducci became quite the celebrity pin up boy, his picture adorning many-a young girl's wall, and when he started to sing in public he quickly established a fan base. The X Factor is clearly only a re-hash of what has been ever thus because with fame came the adulation for Tenducci that we associate with the celebs of today. And all this despite the castrati's barrel chest and

'disproportionately long limbs, making their heads look small in relation to their bodies...'

and the subsequent ridicule this attracted from the cartoonists of the day.

Yet the rumours of relationships with women were rife to the extent that Tenducci was even cited in marriage separation cases, having to flee the country on more than one occasion. He was also absolutely useless with money, so if he wasn't being hunted down by cuckolded husbands he was being chased to pay his debts. Heaven knows what they threatened him with because to be honest... thinking about the fate of poor old Abelard of Heloise fame, well the worst has already been done by the barber's shears hasn't it.

I'm giving a potted and populist version of a rigorous and scholarly work here, meticulously researched and referenced, but for all that the research does not weigh heavy, it is eminently readable. Helen Berry presents her information in the most accessible way, exploring a great deal in the process including fascinating attitudes to sexuality, male beauty and effeminacy in men, (to which women of the day were thought to be more attracted) and the assumed unconsummated love of the castrati...though having assumed they 'couldn't' it is never quite clear what they might have been able to do. It would seem no one thought to write it down in any detail.

So who'd have thought a book like this would prove to be a page-turner, but when Tenducci reached Dublin, well things were really about to hot up. At the pinnacle of his career in the mid 1760s, and invited to Dublin to sing operas in English, it is a meeting with the young Dorothea Maunsell, the daughter of a wealthy barrister, that will really put a bit of a spanner in Tenducci's works.

It was in Dublin some twenty years earlier that Handel's Messiah had received its world premiere to international acclaim, and brought with it a cultural fillip to the city, perhaps not unlike the one happening yet again and which I have witnessed on several recent trips. Eager to be in with the 'it' boy and rubbing shoulders with celebrity, the Maunsell's invited Tenducci into their home where he quickly took on the role of musical mentor to young Dorothea, and, on the basis that surely no mischief could ensue, they spent long periods of time in each other's sole company.

The ensuing elopement, clandestine marriage and quite how the family addressed the humiliating scandal kept me on the very edge of my seat. Dorothea had been raised to make a good society marriage and have children, not to run off with a eunuch, and hell hath no fury like a barrister scorned it would seem. And of course I won't reveal the shocking lengths (well I was shocked) to which Thomas Maunsell resorted in order to try and force his daughter into submission, because that would be to give away the most riveting part of the book. But never underestimate the power of a woman in love either, and when you know that Dorothea subsequently published an account of her ordeal that gives you some clue as to her resilience.

Oh yes, and if you read it for yourself you will discover the mystery of what Tenducci 'may' have carried in his breeches.

But the added reach and attraction of a book like this rests for me in the trails of interest that it opens.

I wanted to go off and look at paintings by Caravaggio,

I wanted to listen to the Scottish ballads.. 'Roslin Castle,' 'The Braes of Ballenden,' and 'Lochaber' made famous by Tenducci.

Is 'the witty Duchess of Gordon', who gets a mention, the same Jane, Duchess of Gordon as in mother of Georgiana, who married the 6th Duke of Bedford and built Endsleigh I wonder. If so I'm sure there is a painting of her in the collection at Port Eliot.

Tenducci sang in Plymouth in 1786 to great acclaim, and I wonder where exactly.

I hadn't listened to the Pergolesi Stabat Mater in ages, now I needed to.

And just what was this aria from Artaxerxes, the first all-sung opera in English, made so popular by Tenducci that even Jane Austen was a little sick of hearing it so many times.

And most of all, with a trip to Dublin coming up on Bloomsday earlier this year, I mapped out a little Tenducci trail around the city just to walk in his and Dorothea's footsteps. It's not hard, having read this book to visit Dame Street and imagine... or wonder if Tenducci nipped in here for a quick chop after an evening performance... and then to wander along here, the fashionable street that Dorothea's parents had moved to.. and wonder which house it may have been.Which one had Tenducci visited and there courted his impressionable young fan... I also like Helen Berry's next suggestion in her coda...

'By engaging with reconstructed sounds, visiting sites of interest, and touching material traces, as well as reading and looking hard in archives, both historian and reader may in future be able to gain a deeper insight into the long-forgotten cadences, the pulses and social rhythms of previous generations.'

So for all that a book like this is written to give us another version of a lesser-known history, perhaps it is also about sparking the imagination of the reader and letting them take their own journey with it. I know I have done exactly that, and how good to find that as a result, I am friends with the eighteenth century at last, though I haven't quite gone the whole hog and pinned a picture of Tenducci on my wall....yet.

Saturday, October 01, 2011

'Ah yes...I'm in court today.' he was telling everyone in his poshest voice

' Please could you not say that' I suggested.

Bookhound was summoned for jury service backalong which has proved to be an interesting experience for us devotees of Judge John Deed. Having spent half our lives getting out of jury service because of work commitments Bookhound decided it was time to fulfill his civic duty, and besides it would make a welcome change from mixing tons of concrete (floor was pending), so he set off with a little spring in his step.

Lest you may think he wasn't taking it seriously think again, trust me, it's been like living with...well not Martin Shaw exactly, perhaps more Kavanagh QC.

We have to say 'All rise' before we are allowed to leave the dinner table now, it's getting tiresome.

Of course I can't tell you a thing about the cases and indeed Bookhound couldn't tell me until they were over, but he was chosen for plenty, sensibly keeping the black cloth that I'd made him to put on his head at the appropriate moment in his pocket.

I've seen it done

'I sentence you to hang from the...'

Of course I know from my day job exactly what everyone gets up to so the majority of the cases came as no surprise to me; one of my team years ago was a magistrate so we were fully appraised of what went on between man and beast /sheep / horse / dog etc. But Bookhound did have a little corker in amongst the benefit frauds and inappropriate liaison cases and I'm sorry I couldn't possibly write about it here, but if ever you come for tea he may well tell you, and then just see if you can swallow that scone and cream without choking.

I nearly inhaled my bowl of Krave over the breakfast table when he told me, and can only begin to imagine what it must be like for twelve complete strangers to have to sit in a room together for several hours discussing... well discussing what they had to discuss and then offering a verdict. What goes on in the jury room stays in the jury room and is highly confidential so I am still just imagining, but even so...

By the way has anyone else discovered Krave??

I hardly like to do a free advert for Kellogs but it's a breakfast cereal reminiscent of those lovely Oat Krunchies which we can't find anywhere now, but Krave has added value because the little pillows are filled with something akin to Nutella. Absolutely delicious.

And has anyone else done their duty and served time on a jury?? I've always evaded it but the Tinker has fond recollections of his stint and of lengthy deliberations over an old lady's theft of a chicken valued at £1.46 (which tells you how long ago it was)

Anyway I can tell it's going to get even more tiresome here now especially when we are watching Judge John in the future.

Thursday, September 29, 2011

Talk of the book and film of The Hours earlier this week, and mentions in comments of the film and the 'nose' and the rather intense and relentlessly humourless portayal of Virginia Woolf, all reminded me to pull this post out from 'draft' and spruce it up, because in another batch of books from Hesperus Press came a copy of A Boy at the Hogarth Press. I'd heard of it but hadn't realised quite what a wonderful little gem it is. A perceptive behind-the-scenes look at the working Woolfs by a disinterested observer. One with no axe to grind or mark to make on the literary world, just a young lad seeing their lives for what they were; recollections of his time spent working at the Hogarth Press as an impressionable sixteen-year old, and recalled in later life by Richard Kennedy.

Bad luck stalks young Richard from the typing errors to the saga of the shelf ..

'Today the trumpet blasts. I put up my shelf. It proved to be a much harder job than I thought. In the first place I had to walk like Jesus carrying the Cross practically the whole way to Tavistock Square because the conductor refused to let me on the bus with the wood...'

and said shelf which finally comes crashing down, showering its contents on an unsuspectiong Leonard, he of the legendary temper, the 'towering rage' and a withering look that could seemingly remove a layer of skin.

But it is Richard Kennedy's eye for the details which add to the enjoyment of the whole; the smelly drains at Rodmell, or sitting next to Virginia while she knits for the first time.

Is it recorded anywhere else that Virginia at least attempted knitting??

Or Virginia rolling her own cigarettes, and then Richard's perceptive observations about the Woolfs as people..

'LW...He is the magician who keeps us all going by his strength of will..and Mrs W is a beautiful magical doll, very precious, but sometimes rather uncontrollable. Perhaps like the doll she hasn't got a soul. But when she feels inclined, she can create fantasy and we all fall over ourselves, or are disapproving.'

And now I'm trying to remember...I watched The Hours very carefully for this detail, having noted from Richard Kennedy's drawings that Virginia Woolf was of a sinistral persuasion, very definitely left-handed in all the illustrations.

And I don't think the film recognised that.

Does it matter?? Probably not in the grand scheme of things, but being both the daughter and the mother of sinistrals, it's something I always notice, finding it an endless fascination to watch a left-handed person write.

If you are left-handed I'd happily sit next to you and watch you do likewise.

Having raised a southpaw and knowing the unusual difficulties it can throw up, I'm trying to decide whether daily life for a left-hander may have been more awkward back then, or of no noticeable difference. I doubt Virginia had the trouble we had the day Offspringette decided she wanted to pick up one of our guitars and learn to play it, or the school lunchtime Knitterbug Club which had the teachers on the brink of a nervous breakdown trying to succeed where I had failed and teach her to knit. Perhaps this is why Virginia is not famed for her knitting either.

The icing on the cake in this book ...or perhaps even the cake itself are the illustrations because every page holds a wonderful sketch of the office or the people along with some wonderfully funny anecdotal moments. Aware that this wasn't written until forty years later, and that these are 'recollections', I'm wondering whether some allowance may need to be made for any influence of growing reputation that may have coloured Richard Kennedy's memories, but setting all that aside this book was a really very pleasant surprise, and if you have a Virginia Woolf shelf you might want to add a copy of A Boy at the Hogarth Press if you don't already have it.

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

It was the arrival of the sixth novel in Susan Hill's Simon Serrailler series, The Betrayal of Trust, to be published on October 6th, that reminded me I still hadn't read the fifth in the series, The Shadows in the Street.

It arrived backalong and vanity had me swiftly turning to page thirty to read my on-the-other-end-of-the-phone cameo appearance in the book, and I was so overcome with a sense of greatness that I forgot to read the rest of it. I mean there were decisions to be made... who would I want to play my part in the TV series for a start, and surely it would be need to be elevated to a walk-on given the importance of the role of the health visitor.

Well I watched The Hours recently, having never watched it before, and it was clear that Meryl Streep would be perfect so I have put in that request.

Incidentally, why have I never watched The Hours before??

Perhaps because I just couldn't get along with the book many years ago??

But the film seemed of an entirely different mettle, those intertwining lives and the connections between past and present, and the over-arching presence and influence of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and that oh so clever twist at the end. Though I'll admit I did find Nicole Kidman's Virginia get-up quite astonishingly real, remembering all that talk of the 'nose' at the time, but I was a little wary, if not weary of the constantly harrowed look on her face. The tucking in of the chin and the raising of the eyes... a bit like the posture and neck alignment of women wearing large hats at weddings if they want to see where they are going. But anyway, I've plumped for good old Meryl, she can turn her hand to just about any role so I'm guessing she'd do me just fine.

Anyway, what will be clear to those who read here is that I know Susan Hill well-enough to be able to tell her that she has promise as a writer and will do well if she keeps at it, but also well enough to tell her if I don't like a book she has written, and which she never seems to mind, because let's be honest, they will sell in their tens of thousands whether I like them or not. But in the interests of transparency I tell you that before declaring that actually I have thoroughly enjoyed The Shadow on the Streets, a real asset to this series which is shaping up to be quite something. This one a good solid crime read read that had me eager to pick the book up at every opportunity, and all aided and abetted by some really good cohesive and atmospheric cover design as you can see.

Blonde, floppy-haired Simon Serailler (heck do any of us really know how to pronounce that...Susan won't say, I've asked... Serailer, Serrayer...) had been mooching around the Scottish island of Taransay,(yes the one where the BBC series Castaway was filmed) trying to get a bit of peace and quiet whilst recovering from the trauma of his last case. In fact he's doing alright because it is chapter ten before he makes an appearance and wouldn't you know it, he's in bed with a bonny local lass having seen the last failed romance off to Nepal at the end of the last book, and the one before that... Diana, whatever happened to her... and then there was the tragedy of Freya in volume one, a master-stroke that took everyone's breath away. I mean how could Susan do that to Simon and to us.

Meanwhile back in Lafferton prostitutes are being murdered, and as you'd expect our DCS, head of SIFT, the Special Incident Flying Task Force, is needed back at base to sort it all out.

I love the way that Susan writes perfectly-sized chapters, rarely more than ten pages in length thus allowing the action to range widely across the life and the inhabitants of the city, and move easily from one to the next, no wonder this has been snapped up for television.

The Shadows in the Street focuses on a varied selection of them all .

Firstly the cathedral and the arrival of a new happy-clappy Dean and his troubled wife, both hell-bent on modernising the liturgy and dragging the place into the twenty-first century, and setting up a nice drop-in centre for the street girls. Simon of course lives in a flat along Cathedral Close, but it a bit of a lapsed C of E man

Then there's the university library and a rather old-fashioned, unmarried librarian called Lesley who still lives with his disabled mother and regularly takes flasks and sandwiches out to the street girls...and who can know how he is paid.

The GP's surgery of course, most crucially the very place where Dr Cat Deerbon makes that all-important call to the health visitor called Lynne who's a bit disillusioned with the NHS (hoping Meryl can pull that one off) to ask about the children of one of the street girls.

The extended Family Serailler with all their little foibles, and of course Simon's mother has died and his stern and rather forbidding father has re-married. Tantalisingly we still don't know why Simon and his father have such a difficult relationship, Susan still keeping that one close to her chest.

And then of course there are the streets and the girls who work them, and the grizzly murders that keep happening whilst the police team seem to be making little progress.

Nice red herrings a la Susan, her favoured dish I think, and enough to keep me guessing to the end, and I wasn't going to fall for any of it because I know what Susan's like, there will be a sudden and devilish twist, or she'll pull the rug out from under your reading bottom.

So I wasn't disappointed and now I'm going to treat myself and motor straight on into The Betrayal of Trust whilst I have Lafferton on the brain. And I'm in the next one too...as me rather than a character in the novel given that Susan has named, in her acknowledgements for this book, each and every one of the people that she chats to on Facebook as respite and company during a writing day.